AMD Gizmo Explorer

[watercooled]

At first glance (admittedly not read it yet, just wanted to share), it appears to be a more powerful, and far more expensive, alternative to boards like the RaspberryPi.
http://www.extremetech.com/computing...-pi-competitor

[Bunjiweb]

Whilst it looks quite good, I don't get what makes this worth 4x as much as a Raspberry Pi for the kind of stuff people would be doing?.... Unless you're playing higher bit-rate 1080p footage the extra power is probably wasted if all you're gunna do is put XBMC on it?... only advantage appears to be the onboard SATA controller and separate sound.

Also, VGA rather than HDMI output?...

[scaryjim]

It's more that it's a) x86, and b) a lot more powerful than RasPi. So you can do a lot more stuff with this. For instance, the iGPU will (afaik) support DirectCompute and OpenCL, giving you a lot of compute power on tap for a developer board. The obvious target markets (IMNSHO, at least) are HPC hobbyists, and people who want to do micro-dev in a familiar (i.e. Windows) environment.

After all, HTPC is kind of a side-use for RasPi - it was meant to be a learning computer for programming and micro-controller development. The fact that a lot of people use them as cheap HTPCs doesn't mean that is their target market. The same goes for the Gizmo; I'm sure a lot will be bought to use as general PCs, but it's actual target is developers and hobbyists.

[watercooled]

As I've probably said before, I'd like something like this with at least two GigE ports and a decent case to upgrade my ALIX router board, as the 100Mbit ports are likely to become a problem in the near future. Soekris do some embedded Atom boards with GigE but the pricing is a bit silly, for home use at least, and quoted power specs aren't nearly as good as the Geode platform on ALIX.

I know it's not an intended use either, but aside from the lack of ports, something like this would be ideal IMHO.

Maybe someone will come up with a dual GigE NIC to connect to the expansion slots?

[scaryjim]

Well, it has a "fast" board edge connector, so it seems likely that someone will do one eventually

Have you looked at the jetway mini-itx boards that have daughterboard expansion? There's one of those with 3x ethernet connections, but I can't remember off-hand whether they were gigabit or 100...

EDIT: Ahha! The add-on board is 3x gigabit ethernet - http://linitx.com/product/11113 - and linitx also have a couple of atom-based (D525) boards that support the add-on: http://linitx.com/product/13531 and http://linitx.com/product/13104

EDIT2: That second board already has 2x gigabit NICs, so you could support up to 5 on that board

[watercooled]

Sorry, I didn't see this in subscriptions for some reason.

I was considering this board: http://www.logicsupply.co.uk/motherb...g-motherboard/ a while back - 4 NICs, low-profile and on-board DC-DC supply is pretty much ideal, but idle DC power is still something like 13W DC. It's hardly massive, but ALIX manages just 3 watts AC. I'm also open to ARM boards but that doesn't really seem to open up any more options. I'm not just complaining because of the higher power draw, but it also implies more heat, which would mean either running uncomfortably hot 24/7, needing a fairly large case for airflow, or a tiny annoying fan, all of which I want to avoid if possible.

The desktop Atom platform just doesn't seem very efficient, I used to use a D510MO board for a file server before I got a HP Microserver, power consumption was in line with the above and even when idle, the large passive CPU heatsink would get uncomfortably hot without a fan moving some air over it. Compared to modern CPUs, the platform is quite dated in terms of power saving.