The Raspberry Pi sort of kicked off a revolution in low-power, barebones mini-computers. But the Raspberry Pi is a really low-power device with a 700 MHz ARM11 processor.

Over the past few years we’ve seen a number of other options with more powerful hardware. The Gizmo 2 is one of the latest… and it’s one of the few to sport an AMD processor with support for Windows Embedded, Linux, or other operating systems.

You can buy the Gizmo 2 from Element14 for $199.

gizmo 2_01

This little computer is positioned as a device for developers looking to build platforms for digital signage, set-top-boxes, game systems, point-of-sales machines, thin clients, or other applications. You can probably use it to build a low-power home computer, but that’s not really what it’s designed for.

The Gizmo 2 comes from the same folks who brought us last year’s Gizmo Explorer Kit. The new model is about the same size, but has a more powerful processor, USB 3.0 support, and a few other improvements.

Specs include a 1 GHz AMD GX-210HA dual-core processor, AMD Radeon HD 8210E graphics, 1GB of RAM, HDMI output, a microSD card slot, mSATA connector, Gigabit Ethernet, 3 USB 3.0 and 2 USB 2.0 connectors, and additional USB headers as well as GPIO, SPI, UART, and other developer pins.

 

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18 replies on “Gizmo 2 is a $199 single-board PC with AMD embedded CPU”

  1. looks like a signage box… hopefully it has better graphics than Intel’s offerings. Looks like a portable hard-disk could be connected, to allow it to show many different advertisements (image and videos).

  2. Any chance that Beema will make its way into products with embedded procs like this?

  3. No comments on the screaming little fan? That was the first thing I saw and looking very dated in this age of fanless designs.

  4. Nvidia’s TK1 is a quad core, 192 GPU cores (Cuda Processing) for 192 dollars. ATI’s offering is weak.

      1. Still Weak, My 250 dollar laptop has better specs then that. Windows / Linux on 1 gig of ram / Dual core? Pssssssssss! Your big difference = slow. Sorry ARM / Cuda is still got it beat.

  5. Seems like a decent board, if you are wanting to use it for development, and you need the GPIO, UART, etc.

    But out of all the 7 or 8 possible uses quoted for this device, a Celeron NUC would be better for almost all of them.

    You would have to absolutely require a GPIO pinout, AND an x86 chip for this board to make any sense at all.

    1. I’m not sure the lineage is important — one can always find an earlier, related gadget to carry the “first of its kind” banner. RPi sold a huge number of units (3.8M as of last month, according to Wikipedia) and built a substantial community around it. And of course they put a big emphasis on education.

  6. This seems a bit expensive, considering the Lenovo ideaCentre Q190 sales for $50 more (or $50 less with the recent discount). The Q190 has 4GB of memory, a 500GB hard drive, and a windows 8.1 license. Adding those features to the Gizmo 2, at retail prices, would cost around $200. That’s quite a premium for Radeon graphics.

    1. Read the article:

      “You can probably use it to build a low-power home computer, but that’s not really what it’s designed for.”

      Also this is way smaller than the Q190 taken apart. Q190 doesn’t have GPIO either.

  7. As i saw todey the meegopad windows windows tv stick with (witch was described some time ago) price of 140$ will be available on 12.12.14 i’m wondering is it worth it. The concept of a thumbdribe pc i so cool.

    1. They also released the Meego p01 https://tinyurl.com/ppys7fl which is the better, all round choice with 4 usb ports, rj45 and a propper 5dbi antenna for the internal wifi, for only $125 as opposed to the Meego t01 for$99 which is small… but maybe to small.

      1. Thanks for the info. The funny part is-how about heat on meego t01 becouse the p01 is quite big in comparition to the t01. nevertheless i think that there is a place in the market for such small tv pc’s.

  8. Wow, all those GPIO pins off the back of the board do make it like a super-RPi… it almost looks like it was designed to be slotted into some kind of larger board for making clusters…

  9. If there was a way to bump up that RAM it looks like maybe it could be a decent little runner for basic stuff.

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