News - MinnowBoard MAX launched, BayTrail SoC on a 99x74mm board

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Launched at EE Live! with price starting from $99.

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These would make great home servers, plug a USB2/3 hub and a load of external drives and you've got a nice high performance NAS too.

Think I'd rather have a cheap Atom based M-Itx board with regular sata ports myself, but each to their own...

Frankly, you could boot it off SD and run a big SATA drive off the onboard port, so why mess with USB hubs and the like? You won't get reliable RAID or fault-tolerance off USB drives, so just have a big SATA drive for main storage and a big USB drive for backup :)

That said, a 1.33Ghz dual core with 2GB is plenty of oomph for a useable desktop system (given Bay Trail's overall IPC improvement), let alone a dev board. Stick a big microSD card in it and you could carry around an entire system the size of a portable hard drive. Wonder what the overall power draw's like on these ... in an office environment where you need hundreds of low-performance systems (e.g. call centres?), you might be able to get a significant return on investment kitting the place out with tiny devices like these...

Everyone knows the next step in this drill: the price comes down.
The Raspberry Pi Organization has, hopefully, been planning for just such a scenario, and an anwer--to keep their very admirable goals on track--will be for