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The Mini Linux PC the Size of a Wall Plug
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Fabless chip design company Marvell unveiled a new concept for a computer that fits inside the palm of your hand, or on your wall socket.
Remember that $10 (or even $20) PC that ended up being a huge disappointment? Marvell might finally be able to make good on some of the expectations set by that original concept, unrealistic price points aside.
Marvell calls it the Plug Computer, for its small form factor that can plug directly into a wall socket (it looks like a big AC adapter wall wart without the cord) and at is designed to draw so little power (5 W) that it can be left on all of the time.
Specifically, the Plug Computer unveiled is called “SheevaPlug,” a development platform uses a Marvell Kirkwood processor based on an embedded 1.2 GHz Sheeva CPU equipped with 512 MB of FLASH and 512 MB of DRAM. Connection to the home network is via Gigabit Ethernet. Peripherals such as direct attached storage can be connected using a USB 2.0 port.
Multiple standard Linux 2.6 kernel distributions are supported on the Sheeva Plug development platform enabling rapid application development. The new device is ideal for use as desktop terminals in large support offices, where only basic client and logging software is being used, such as a tech support facility. These modules can also be used at sales terminals at retail locations. Needless to say, very low power usage, extremely small foot print, and very low cost of ownership make Marvell's Plug Computer an attractive option for businesses of any size.
The SheevaPlug development kit is available now for $99, but promises an eventual version at $49. At that price, the plug could make one very attractive home media server solution for those who want something unobtrusive and economical, but aren’t afraid to tinker around with Linux.
Check out Marvell’s site on plug computing for more on the concept. What do you think? Is this something that you would buy to serve other machines, or even something to replace an existing server?
Source : Tom's Hardware US
nice, but wasnt there a smaller thumb drive sized linux box for $99
nice, but wasnt there a smaller thumb drive sized linux box for $99
Yes, it is called Gumstix http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS6027032354.html
But it requires special Linux distribution. The Sheeva Plug will be able to run standard distributions like new Debian 5.0 "Lenny".
Hmm... but can you game on it?!
I am still waiting for the watch computer.
Hmm this could be turned into a kickass router if it just had another ethernet port. DD-WRT anyone?
I hope someone doesn't say "Yeah, but can you run crysis on it!"
Where do I get the video output from this thing? is that the SDIO or SOIO? I really think they should have utilized the sata interface that is supposedly available. you only need one USB port and can have that replicate out to 127 devices, but having a crappy disk interface just blows. Also, is there any way to fit a wireless WIFI into that? I am sure most of this has to do with price, but hey, wishful thinking.
Well, it is not going to replace anything of mine. A lack of high speed(usb is the only interface I see for a hard drive)storage and a place for my TV card.
It would make a great file box or even a router with a USB network card.
im thinking a good little internet surfer, that way you don't have a larger desktop, laptop, or netbook to use unwanted energy. 5 watts is plenty and all you will have to do is turn on a monitor when you want to get online. BTW, DSL will be the bestlinux distro for this
BTW, DSL will be the bestlinux distro for this
Hi daft,
The Sheeva Plug is using ARM based CPU, do you know any ports or plans to port DSL to ARM architecture?
wow me like this. always wanted some way of having a NAS for my 4 external USB drives
this would b great to use as dumb terminals that only require to run 1 program
This would be great for thin clients.
Hmm... but can you game on it?!
Is that a joke. It runs Linux, and it's extremely underpowered, not to mention it's not x86. So, while I can run TF2 fine in Ubuntu, this thing isn't going to be able to run any games made for actual gaming machines.
What the heck would you do with it?
What the heck would you do with it?
High performance linux router?
Lower power file server(as long as usb is not too slow for you)?
small web server?
teamspeak,vent server?
Torrent box?
Paper weight?
What the heck would you do with it?
did u read the whole article? it would be used for low powered tasks, but tasks that would probably need a computer to be on constantly.
"The new device is ideal for use as desktop terminals in large support offices, where only basic client and logging software is being used, such as a tech support facility. These modules can also be used at sales terminals at retail locations."
Reminds me of my currently still running NSLU2.
they should have dropped the ethernet port and used Ethernet Over Power!
As for those interested in a small file/www/ftp server, a SDHC card can be fitted... If more storage space is needed, an external USB drive can be used but it's questionable if the power supplied is enough for more drives, eventually a powered USB hub is needed.
For Wi-Fi access, a SDIO or USB card could be the solution, if it supports hostAP mode.
Hmm this could be turned into a kickass router if it just had another ethernet port. DD-WRT anyone?
No problem with an external VLAN switch.
Most routers use internally VLAN switches anyway, due to a single ethernet port on the CPU.
DD-WRT looks nice but has it's inherent limitations. openWRT anyone?
It's Power Over Ethernet, not the opposite. But yeah, seeing that this thing will always be in a wall socket and is developped by a networking company, why not?
For the average consumer, this things has almost no interest but it could prove very useful in a small to medium organization that has a lot of repetitive low tasks and/or restricted space and access to networks.
The question is: where do I plug my monitor?
Does it have some built in surge protection? Clearly its designed for wall plugging but for surge protection it would be plugged into a surge strip which defeats the purpose of the wall wart design. A surge protector would take up a ton of space relative to the size of this thing so I hope they have some surge protection. Just a replaceable fuse or something. Be fairly easy to steal so I hope there is a secure mounting adapter for it, like a bracket that goes over some of it and screws into the wall not that its fool proof but at least it would be easy to notice if someone ripped it off the wall.
Wow, they really did what I was thinking about since 1 year, a very small, cheap but very efficient headless computing device that you could use everywhere. A thing like that has an unlimited number of possibilities... you could embedded it everywhere:
in car, it would use a 12V inverter do power itself and could be a gps with the use of a sd card and a usb antenna, a media player / equalizer / amplifier which read music from your sd card, or by USB from your mp3 player.
at home, it could be used in domotic, media station, ftp/http server for ITs, and you could use it to install monowall and turn it into a crazy router if they add a second network chipset.
militaries could use it to create cheap very intelligent weapons
that's crazy, at 49$ I would buy 1 for sure to set a file server.
It would bee a nice addition for home automation (X10-type stuff...) I could see plugging this in NEAR a thermostat and integrating it with other parts of the home network.
I just got mine last night! Pretty sweet setup... The part that plugs into the wall socket is removable and accepts a power cord (included). Speed is pretty good. It comes preinstalled with Ubuntu and is pretty much plug-in and log-in.
So far I loaded mine up as a LAMP (linux, apache, mysql and php) server and got Samba and VSFTPd going. That takes about about 55% of the available 512MB. I also plugged in an external usb hard drive to beef up the cpacity.
I have my new file server/dev box! Yaay Sheeva!
I have my new file server/dev box! Yaay Sheeva!
Cool!
Did you get some performance counters running?
How many simultaneous connections can support?
Hi. Short on time so just I ran a couple of quickie benchmarks:
dBench - Throughput 8.25256 MB/sec 100 procs
TCP STREAM TEST from 0.0.0.0 (0.0.0.0) port 0 AF_INET to localhost (127.0.0.1) port 0 AF_INET : demo
Recv Send Send Utilization Service Demand
Socket Socket Message Elapsed Send Recv Send Recv
Size Size Size Time Throughput local remote local remote
bytes bytes bytes secs. 10^6bits/s % S % U us/KB us/KB
87380 16384 16384 10.02 963.13 99.90 -1.00 8.497 -1.000
Hi. Short on time so just I ran a couple of quickie benchmarks
Thanks
It's better then I was expecting. This gadget could be excellent torrent server or music server. Even SDTV streaming. Definitely I am going to get one to play with.
Awesome! It's pretty nifty as a web server too:
Server Software: Apache/2.2.11
Server Hostname: localhost
Server Port: 80
Document Path: /
Document Length: 8031 bytes
Concurrency Level: 1000
Time taken for tests: 21.525 seconds
Complete requests: 10000
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Total transferred: 83495041 bytes
HTML transferred: 80334093 bytes
Requests per second: 464.59 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 2152.457 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 2.152 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 3788.14 [Kbytes/sec] received
Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 0 288 1931.9 13 21130
Processing: 79 665 2239.6 238 21321
Waiting: 20 641 2230.3 228 21071
Total: 165 952 3170.4 262 21469
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 262
66% 290
75% 299
80% 305
90% 515
95% 3252
98% 11018
99% 21352
100% 21469 (longest request)
I had the Sheeva Plug for about 2 weeks now and it works great. I have an external WD 360G HDD connected via USB. Its running all my server functions and takes about 1/10 of the power.
I have performance and power usage numbers for anyone interested:
http://computingplugs.com/index.ph [...] erformance