

Samsung's 'Origen' ARM development board connected to an LCD display

Source: origenboard.org

Linaro and Samsung have announced the 'Origen' low cost ARM development board with Samsung's dual-core Cortex-A9 Exynos 4210 processor at its heart. The board, which will sell for $199, has been designed to run the Linaro Evaluation Builds of Ubuntu Linux and Google's Android that Linaro already produces for TI's PandaBoard/BeagleBoard, ST-Ericsson's Snowball and Freescale's i.MX53 'Quick Start' development kits as part of its mission to simplify the development of open source solutions on the ARM platform.

The Samsung 'Origen' comes with 1GB of DDR3 RAM which is mounted with the processor on a replaceable daughter board; this will allow new CPU variants to be made available in future. The main board offers connectors for HDMI, camera, 1024x600 LCD, stereo audio, RS-232, USB 2.0 OTG and 2.0 Host, and two SD slots, and also includes a Wi-Fi/Bluetooth chipset and antenna connector. The Exynos 4210 processor is a 45nm ARM chip with 2D and 3D graphics accelerator allowing it to produce 1080p at 30fps with MPEG-4/H.263/H.264 and MPEG-2/VC1/Xvid support.



Close-up on the "Origen" board

Source: origenboard.org The board will also be available with a $155 LCD and Touchscreen kit and a $40 power adapter, an antenna and cables kit is also available. The board will be supplied and shipped from South Korea's Insignal.co.kr and shipping will cost an extra $50. The board can be ordered from Origenboard.org, where further details, documentation and source code can be found.

The Linaro group, which was formed at last year's Computex trade show, is currently celebrating its first year of bringing together the Linux engineering efforts of its founders. ARM, IBM, Freescale, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and TI came together to create a not-for-profit organisation which could make it simpler for developers to use ARM with Linux distributions. To that end it has delivered Evaluation Builds of Android and Ubuntu which can be quickly installed on development kit, allowing developers to focus on creating their application. The Evaluation Builds are developed in the open, come with toolchains and are appropriately optimised.

Linaro has also provided a coordinating point for ARM builders and Linux developers. For example, recent issues raised by Linus Torvalds over the handling of the Linux kernel's ARM source are now being addressed by Linaro members working together to extract elements that should not be in the kernel and to remove duplication in the code that remains and is common between members. Linaro is now expanding with a new partner programme which will allow software vendors, service providers and others to embed engineers at Linaro where they can work together on projects of common interest. This will allow further co-ordination at a technical level between its members and other parts of the ARM ecosystem.

(djwm)