SlashGear Japan
Marvell have been talking up their SheevaPlug reference design, a wall-wart power plug that actually hides an entire Linux PC. Priced at $99, inside the SheevaPlug there’s an ARM-based 1.2GHz Sheeva embedded processor, 512MB of DDR2 memory, 512MB of flash storage, gigabit ethernet and USB 2.0; in fact the development kit is available now.
Eventually, prices are expected to drop to around $49. Among the first products to hit the market based on the Sheeva plug-computer design will be the Pogoplug, which so impressed us back at CES 2009. The Pogoplug is designed to simply take a USB hard-drive and turn it into network attached storage, accessible not only from the home network but through a web-based portal. It’s expected to cost around $99 when it launches in a few months time, but preorders are being taken at just $79.
Meanwhile expect the SheevaPlug to find plenty of new fans among the open-source community; it’ll play nicely with “multiple standard Linux 2.6 kernel distributions”. Its eco-credentials are good, too, with Marvell claiming it uses less than one tenth of the power of a typical PC being used as a home server.
[via The Tech Report]
4 Responses to “Marvell SheevaPlug: $99 Linux PC hidden in a wall-wart”
Hurting Now February 24, 2009
This is the same oem then for Pogoplug… Interesting. So we can assume that pogoplug has similar specs w/o the io ports/card reader/etc.
NeutralChris Davies February 24, 2009
Possibly, but I’m trying to remember what ports we saw on the Pogoplug at CES, and I don’t remember anything other than ethernet and USB. Of course, they could’ve simply tweaked the case to cover the card reader, etc, or maybe even be running the OS from it inside.
We’re hopefully getting a Pogoplug review unit through soon, so we’ll be able to say more then.
Neutralastroturtle April 8, 2009
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 pre-installed 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 capacity.
I have my new file server/dev box! Yaay Sheeva!
Neutralpushbx April 28, 2009
Marvell’s website seems to indicate that pogo is the same hardware as sheeva. I’ve be playing with the plug for about 2 weeks now and its working great for me. I moved all my server functions to this thing and its now working at 1/10 the power draw.
I have performance and power usage numbers if anyone is interested
http://computingplugs.com/inde.....erformance
Neutral