Shuttle is probably best known for making small form-factor Windows computers. But some of the company’s newest products are small, ARM-based Android devices. The Shuttle DSA2LS and DSA2LE systems are positioned as digital signage players which you can attach to a monitor to create a display for your business.
But the systems also look like they could make interesting options for folks interested in a small, fanless low-power ARM-based computer.
The Shuttle DSA2LS showed up at the FCC this week, but Shuttle first introduced the devices earlier this year.
The device features an integrated power supply, but there are other models that support Power over Ethernet functions instead.
Each model has a Freescale i.MX6 ARM Cortex-A9 dual-core processor, support for 720p and 1080p media playback, and Android 4.2 Jelly Bean software. The DSA2L systems also have 1GB of RAM, between 4GB and 8GB of integrated storage, a card reader, 4 USB ports HDMI and VgA output, and an RS-232 port as well as Gigabit Ethernet And WiFi.
While they ship with Android software, Freescale’s chips also support Linux… and there’s an effort underway to provide reverse-engineered graphics drivers that could bring hardware-accelerated 3D graphics and HD video support to the chips, which would dramatically improve the performance of some tasks when running Ubuntu or other Linux-based operating systems.
For mini-PC functionality, I would expect minimum Cortex-A15-level cores.
A9s are OK for ultra-mobile but for a much-higher power budget, like this, the higher IPC should be taken advantage of.
The GPU is different from the one in Novena laptop, so the drivers are different.
etnaviv drivers should already work with i.MX6 dual however.
“hardware-accelerated 3D graphics and HD video support to the chips” ARM on Linux….
it’t a nice dream… but still a dream.
IMO … NOT DOABLE!
There is a lack of interest from the GPU/VPU manufacturers for supporting Linux drivers.
ONLY ANDROID! Why? I can’t figure it out the answer….
I hope the NVIDIA on it’s new ARM platform will release Linux (even closed sourced) graphic drivers
“Freescale i.MX6 ARM Cortex-A9 dual-core”, fail…