[oe] FYI: Snowball (new low-cost board similar to beagle/panda)

[Petr Štetiar]

Han Hartgers <han.hartgers at gmail.com> [2011-06-18 23:28:04]:

> It looks to be in a similar league as the Beagleboard xM.  It has a more
> memory, Sata, 2 SD card slots.  But at the down side complicated expansion
> connector and less USB ports.

What do you mean by 'complicated expansion connector'. Is it complicated to
get the connector/part? Or is it expensive?

> The main advantage of this board would be the hardware video encoder and
> decoder and the better(?) software stack for that part. But I don't know if
> it is really as good as mentioned on the website.  But a bit of a strange
> choice to have a good hardware encoder/decoder but no dvi/hdmi connector
> (needs a daughter board.) This (better supported?) hardware encoder/decoder
> would push this cortex-a8 to the level of (or beyond) the Pandaboard with
> it's dual core Cortex-a9 on this video point.

As always, it depends on your use case(s), plans and ideas, but for example I
prefer LVDS over HDMI and as another example, I've C3/C4 and no XM, because
there's simply no NAND flash. Simply said, there won't be some universal board
which would suit all of us :-)

And I think, that the competition is always good.

-- ynezz