Smallest Gumstix Motherboard, Overo(TM) Earth, Provides Open Source Community With Lowest Cost, Highest Performance ARM-Based Platform
Posted on: Tuesday, 28 October 2008, 12:00 CDT
SAN JOSE, Calif., Oct. 28 /PRNewswire/ -- At only 17mm x 58mm x 4.2mm in size, the Overo(TM) Earth motherboard gives open source innovators access to the industry's highest performance, generally available ARM(R)-based platform in the tiniest, lowest cost Linux computer available. Gumstix, Inc. today announced the general availability of its Overo Earth motherboard that is based on the Texas Instruments (TI) OMAP3503 applications processor.
With Overo Earth, the open source community can freely innovate in a vast range of application areas using this tiny computer. Ideal for 1,000 to 50,000 EAU products, Overo Earth encompasses impressive computational power, handheld power levels, tremendous expandability and open source software at significantly reduced design time and cost.
The Overo Earth motherboard is now available for purchase at http://www.gumstix.com/ for $149 USD.
For a demonstration of the Overo Earth motherboard, visit TI booth #701 at the Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) Boston held in Boston, Mass. from October 28-30, 2008.
Nearly 40 percent smaller than existing Gumstix motherboards, the Overo Earth motherboard runs Linux kernel 2.6.27 or higher. Linux developers can also take advantage of the 256 MB low power DDR RAM, 256 MB NAND flash, on-board microSD adapter, 24-pin flex ribbon connector for camera control signals and two (2) x 70-pin AVX 5602-14 connectors for a wide range of functional options in expansion board design. The power consumption of the Overo Earth motherboard is typically less than 1W.
"Our customers are always asking us for smaller and more powerful handset devices, developed in faster timescales," said Ben Toner, Engineer & Business Consultant for mobile terminals at Roke Manor Research Limited. "Building on Texas Instruments' powerful OMAP family, the additional functionality offered by Overo can facilitate even faster handset design. This increases our competitive advantage in this marketplace which is good for us, and more importantly good for our customers."
Overo Earth is plug compatible with future Overo products to be based on TI's OMAP35x applications processors, such as the superscalar OMAP3530 which features the ARM, high-performance digital signal processor (DSP), PowerVR SGX(TM) graphics engine licensed by Imagination Technologies and multimedia-rich accelerators.
"Our customers now have access to the widest range of performance and expandability in a small, reusable reference design with the Overo motherboards," said Gerard Andrews, applications processors product line manager, TI. "We look forward to seeing the design ideas and innovations that spur from the open source community as product engineers from around the world harness the small size, high performance and low power of Gumstix' tiny Overo computer."
Leveraging the laptop-like performance of the OMAP3503 processor, the Overo Earth motherboard takes advantage of the 600 MHz ARM Cortex(TM)-A8 processor and integrated peripherals. This Cortex-A8 processor achieves an additional 4x performance improvement over the 300MHz ARM9 through its superscalar architecture, which allows implementation of instruction-level parallelism within a single processor. For more information, visit http://www.ti.com/omap35x.
About Roke Manor Research Limited
Roke, founded in 1956, is a Siemens centre of excellence for communications, electronic sensors and networks, innovative solutions and specialist R&D contracts worldwide. The company employs 478 people. Orders for the financial year ending 30 September 2008 were 47.2 million pounds sterling and turnover for the same period was 43.4 million pounds sterling. For more information, visit http://www.roke.co.uk/.
About Gumstix, Inc.
Founded in 2003, Gumstix develops and sells small form factor computers and related products to commercial product designers, network managers & software engineers in more than 40 countries worldwide. For more information visit http://www.gumstix.com/
Trademarks
OMAP is a trademark of Texas Instruments. ARM is a registered trademark of ARM Ltd and Cortex is a trademark of ARM Ltd. POWERVR SGX as a trademark of Imagination Technologies Ltd.
Gumstix, Inc.
CONTACT: Don Anderson of Gumstix, Inc., 1-888-427-3428, don@gumstix.com
Web site: http://www.gumstix.com/http://www.ti.com/omap35xhttp://www.roke.co.uk/
Source: PRNewswire
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