Thursday, February 26, 2009

The not-slug: SheevaPlug

popcon lists approximately 1000 arm/armel Debian installations. There is also listed 864 installations of nslu2-utils, letting us estimate that approximately 85% of debian/arm(el) installations are Linksys nslu2's. It is nicked sympathetically as "The Slug", which pretty accurately describes the performance of nslu2. Still, people have found absolutely amazing amount of ways to use their slugs. What would you do with something approximately 10x more powerful with same prize/size range?

Enter the Marvell SheevaPlug




| What | Slug     | SheevaPlug |
| CPU  | 266Mhz   | 1.2Ghz     |
| Cache| 32KB     | 32+256KB   |
| Flash| 8MB      | 512MB      |
| MEM  | 32MB     | 512MB      |
| Net  | 100Mb    | 1Gb        |


And that's not everything - SheevaPlug comes with SDIO slot and miniusb to be used as a serial console (and JTAG). No soldering needed for hacking.

Some more details on the LinuxDevices article.

For those of you who think that has one port too few of something, or don't like the wall-wart design, Other devices based on kirkwood SoC (which SheevaPlug is based on) are on the way from various ODM/OEM houses.
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2 comments:

  1. Daniel JacobowitzFebruary 26, 2009 at 8:33 PM

    My two cents - if someone makes a version of this I don't have to attach an ugly external USB wireless device to, I'd buy it immediately. That's the only thing that made me wait.

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  2. UnknownMay 4, 2009 at 12:57 PM

    The Sheeva plug is much faster than slug. I have performance numbers here for those interested.

    http://computingplugs.com/index.php/SheevaPlug_PerformanceBTW, there are much speculation on the forums about using a SD-wifi card. It "should" work but no one has tried it yet.

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