[Arm-netbook] Mini-PCIe and other interfaces (was Re: Intel at CES)

[Paul Boddie]

On Thursday 5. January 2017 22.30.42 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
> ---
> crowd-funded eco-conscious hardware: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68
> 
> On Thu, Jan 5, 2017 at 7:06 PM, Alain Williams <addw at phcomp.co.uk> wrote:
> > About 30 seconds in on the BBC video you get a quick view of the hole.
> 
>  ah!  that looks very much like Mini PCIe.  which has USB and a
> one-lane PCIe on it, a few GPIOs and I2C.  50 pin.  if that's what
> they've picked it's not a bad choice.

Mini-PCIe rang a bell, and then I suddenly remembered the following unrelated 
product from before the Christmas vacation:

http://globalscaletechnologies.com/p-72-marvell-espressobin.aspx

I actually found it via here, originally:

https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Marvell/ESPRESSOBin

Which may mean that some of the Debian-on-ARM people are familiar with it. The 
Mini-PCIe connection is that this board actually supports that interface along 
with SATA and multiple network ports, which is pretty unusual for a low-cost 
single board computer.

What might be more interesting in the context of EOMA68 or related standards 
is the SoC, the Armada 3700:

https://github.com/MarvellEmbeddedProcessors/main/wiki/Armada-3700

Despite very odd usage of the word "proprietary" on that page, it appears that 
the documentation and software is pretty transparent, although I haven't dug 
into any of this myself.

Sorry if this is tangential or got mentioned before!

Paul