Marvell this week introduced its new SheevaPlug development platform, a reference design for the company's plug computing concept.
"The idea is that you'll have an ultra-small computer plugged into an electrical socket: it'll be about the size of the socket itself, and yet pack in enough processing power and network connectivity to manage and serve media stored on an attached thumb-drive or hard drive," writes Fast Company's Kit Eaton. "By accessing the plug computer over your home network, you'd be able to get at your files from wherever you needed in your house, or over a Internet connection when you're out and about."
"The SheevaPlug is a $99 reference design based on the company's 'plug computer' concept, which means it's more of a proof of concept than a planned product," writes InternetNews' Andy Patrizio. "Using a device not much bigger than a salt shaker, Marvell managed to fit a 1.2GHz, ARM-based Sheeva embedded processor, 512MB of DDR2 memory, 512MB of flash memory, a gigabit Ethernet, and a USB 2.0 port. It runs a Linux 2.6 Debian kernel derivative for an operating system and supports multiple standard Linux 2.6 kernel distributions and tools on the SheevaPlug development platform."
"You can connect any type of external storage and turn this into a network attached storage device or media server of sorts – other uses that come to mind include a remote print server or even a low end web server to run tests with," writes TechSpot's Jose Vilches. "Marvell won't be selling devices based on SheevaPlug directly but is encouraging manufacturers to build off the platform with a $99 development kit."
More here from EcoGeek … more here from Computerworld … more here from InformationWeek … more here from LinuxDevices … more here from CNET News … and the press release is here.