$199 4" x 4" AMD board with Open BIOS and GPIO expandability.

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Scott Sullivan <scott-lxSQFCZeNF4 at public.gmane.org>

| http://www.gizmosphere.org/

| I've seen a lot of boards come out lately that have had nifty feature sets,
| but the lack of support usually means the die on the vine (Via APC.... *fume*)

What's up with that?  Replaced by Rock and Paper?  Android instead of
Linux (closed source drivers)?  Via historically hasn't been a good Linux 
player, at least with regards to video drivers.

| Anyways, would like to see peoples thoughts and comments.

I'm a cheapskate.  I don't think that this is too interesting because
of the bargains I've found:

- I have an Acer AO522 netbook with a similar "APU" (AMD C-50) for
  $230 perhaps a year and a half ago.  This netbook came with a lot
  more than that little board.

- I bought three Foxconn nT-A3500 barebones "nettop" computers with
  AMD E-350 APU at $100 each over a year ago.  I had to add RAM and
  disk.  Very cute.
	<http://www.foxconnchannel.com/ProductDetail.aspx?T=NanoPC&U=en-us0000001>
  Newegg.ca sells them for $159.99 + $11.49 shipping at the moment.
  I saw them somewhere for less on boxing day.
  They are getting a bit long in the tooth.  But AMD's chips are not
  improving much these days (sad!).

I admit that a bare board can do things that netbooks and nettops
cannot (and vice versa).  So maybe my reaction is irrelevant.

I don't know what AMD G-Series APU is being used.  Oh, if you dig far 
enough, you find it is a G-Series T40e, one of the 2011 Brazos designs 
(like the C-50 and E-350 in my computers).  Dual core, 1GHz, 6.4W, so a 
lot like my C-50, but with lower power consumption. 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Fusion> 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_Fusion_microprocessors#Brazos_.282011.29> 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_Fusion_microprocessors#Embedded_Processors>

The APUs have decent graphics but there have been annoying problems.
For example, AMD did not release specs to enable the open-source
Radeon driver to put audio over HDMI, something necessary for an HTPC.
That may have been solved by now (by reverse engineering) but it
wasn't in a timely fashion for my needs.

The proprietary driver didn't work with Ubuntu for a long time (may
have been fixed by now) but Ubuntu didn't seem to care for over a year.
<https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nvidia-common/+bug/873058>
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists