The Cubietruck is an upcoming mini-computer with a dual-core ARM Cortex-A7 processor, up to 2GB of RAM, Gigabit Ethernet, and WiFi and Bluetooth built in.

While it’s not the most powerful device of it’s type, the Cubietruck does have a few tricks up it sleeve, including out-of-the-box support for both Google Android and Ubuntu Linux.

 

Cubietruck

Over the past year or two we’ve seen dozens, possibly hundreds of tiny desktop computers with ARM-based processors hit the street. Sure, most of them are sold as media boxes that let you connect your TV to the internet and stream online video or play games, but essentially they’re tiny, cheap computers.

And some are designed to be just that. The Raspberry Pi, for instance, is a $35 PC board with an ARM11 processor and support for open source software including versions of Debian and Fedora Linux.

The makers of the Cubieboard figured they could do better, and released a tiny PC last year with a faster CPU , more memory, and more ports. This month they launched a new model with an even faster, dual-core chip.

Like the Cubieboard, the Cubietruck is essentially a PC-on-a-board, which means it won’t come with a case. You can buy or build your own. At 4.3″ x 3.1″ the new model is a bit bigger than a Cubieboard, which provides more room for input and output ports and space to build a case that can hold a 2.5″ hard drive or solid state disk.

cubietruck_02

The system has a microSD card slot, 2 USB ports, HDMI and VGA ports, a headphone jack, a SATA 2.0 interface, and extended pins which you can use for programming, debugging, or connecting peripherals.

Cubiesteam hasn’t announced a launch date or price yet, but you can find more pictures at the team’s website.

thanks Daniel!

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17 replies on “Cubietruck is a small, open source mini PC with an Allwinner A20 dual-core CPU”

  2. I would love to see this with a Tegra 3.
    THEN it would be a runner.

  3. But it isn’t fast enough. A one GHz a20 is half the speed of a 1.6 GHz 3066. Sorry guys, you are optimizing the wrong attributes first. I would love to use this but cannot. It’s too slow.

    1. Perhaps. But the old model was already twice the speed of Raspberry Pi, so there’s so little market pressure to improve that I can’t blame them for skipping most expensive CPUs. They already did improve it though, so now Raspberry is left deeply in the dust behind.

    3. Well, My raspberry pi was was too slow to run web browser unless I turned off the javascript. If it wasnt for that javascript (mostly running advertising) burning up the CPU cycles, the raspberry pi would have been adequate for me. Disqus is also a guilty partner. Sadly, some important pages that I work with require javascript even though they are not the ones burning up the CPU cycles.

      The raspberry pi saves me a few hundred dollars in power consumption every year, because without it, I would be running a pentium computer 24/7, for SVN server, CUPS server, SSH gateway and even web server. It runs on about 5 Watt whereas the pentium had a 500W power supply and probably consumed 250W during normal use, and you know, the price of electricity keeps going up.

      I am definitely going to buy a quad core cubie truck or three when I can. A single core is twice as fast as the raspberry pi and a quad core ought be be fast enough, to do comfortable web browsing.

      The VGA is important. That will make them compatable with the monitors that I have. The SATA is also important. That will make it much faster. My ideal quantity of RAM would be 4G, but I will take 2G, if that is what is available.

      1. Dude, pc with cpu p4 2.66 s478, i865G mobo, 2x 1gb ddr1 sticks, 1x 3.5″ 500 Gb sata hdd, ati radeon 9600xt agp, psu lc600h/12 running win xp has power consumption around [email protected] idle and 120W full load.
        Tested with Voltcraft Energy Check 3000.

  4. VGA! That says it all. If the price is right, this can be a real success. You could do pretty much everything with a board like this, and a used monitor from yesteryear, from android games, HD-video, Web-browsing/streaming etc. All-in-one ARM boards like this will revolutionize Internet and digital content access for many people in the very poor countries around the world, who are still huddled 10 at-a time, in front of a Pentium 3 with Windows 98, put together from salvaged scraps, barely able to playback 640*480 video, or access flash-heavy web pages. I would however, have liked to see more legacy connector support, such as, IDE and PS2, that way you could easily add old DVD-ROM’s and HDD’s.

    1. Well, I guess most points you’ve mentioned can be workarounded with USB Converters (HDD, DVD, PS/2, Headset, Webcam,…). So yes, this really could could trigger a revoltuion in the poor world. I guess the cheap chinese “Android TV Sticks” will make the race.

  5. Are there any generic Linux kernel friendly ARM (ie. I don’t need to rely on the OEM to provide up to date patched Linux kernels) , or even better, Intel Atom mini boards with multiple SATA (at least SATA II) ports and 1-2 gigabit Ethernet ports? I want to put together a simple NAS for fun. I don’t need RAID, ECC memory and fancy graphics since it won’t be storing sole copies of files and there won’t be a GUI.

    I’m looking for something that can fully use the gigabit link without too much CPU usage. Hopefully, the board is less than $200.

    Thanks.

  6. Seems like the replacement for my 10-year-old desktop. I’ll have a more dev-friendly computer with 4 times the RAM of my old desktop

    1. The existing CubieBoard has SATA. I’ve just got a CubieBoard 2, and it’s looking like a really good platform.

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