Here Comes MIPS Creator CI20 Board, A Raspberry Pi Like Dev Board For Hacker!


Tuesday, September 02, 2014: There is new entry in open source developer’s board- MIPS Creator CI20. These days every processor manufacturer has its own developers community. AMD has its Gizmo community while Intel has MinnowBoard Max developers community. Imagination Technologies has announced ISA developer board similar to Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone Black SBCs.

Creator is a new programme from Imagination which will provide low cost development systems for use by the open source community, enthusiast, hobbyist, cross platform developers (i.e. Arduino), and partners looking to create applications using IP technologies.

Creator CI20 SBC is powered by 1.2 GHz Ingenic JZ4780 system chip along with PowerVR SGX540 GPU and 1 GB of DDR3 RAM. It comes with 8 GB of NAND flash storage option and SD card slot for expandable memory support. The board comes with 10/100 Ethernet port, WiFi and bluetooth connectivity, USB OTG support, HDMI port and CMOS camera input. The board is just 90.2 mm x 95.3 mm in dimension.

MIPS Creator CI20 comes with user guide, hardware and software documentation, spec sheet, Linux kernel, U-Boot sources and support forum. All this material is available for free on eLinux.org.

Alexandru Voica, technology marketing specialist of Imagination Technologies has posted on company blog that, “The Creator CI20 dev board is a multimedia powerhouse that has a OpenGL ES 2.0-capable PowerVR SGX540 GPU and dedicated video hardware for a suite of video codecs, including MPEG-4, H.264, VP8, MPEG-2, RV9 and others, making it ideal for HTPC enthusiasts”.

Prpl is known as a open source community for all MIPS based products. It is like a Linaro for MIPS. The statement says that, the MIPS Creator CI20 is based on principles and development of prpl.
 
The SBC in this board is capable of booting any OS from flash drive or SD card. As of now, Debian 7, Yocto, Arch, Gentoo and some other Linux distributions are supported. Android 4.4 KitKat support will arrive soon. The Linux kernel BSP project is open on gitHub. Xorg-copliant OpenGL 2.1 and OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0 drivers support comes with the board.

MIPS is known for deeply embedded processors. MIPS exists in telecom equipment, routers, access points, remote control etc. MIPS is less known because of it doesn't exist in red hot mobile industry. MIPS is the core of Qualcomm Atheros AR9331 SoC. This SoC is used in OpenWRT Linux for SBCs and COMs. Creator I20 is not the first low cost board out there. Company’s website shows all MIPS SBCs.

 Creator CI20 specs
 
• Processor — Ingenic JZ4780 system-on-chip
◦ CPU — 2x 1.2GHz XBurst MIPS32 cores
◦ GPU — SGX540
◦ FPU — IEEE754
• Memory:
◦ RAM — 1GB (32-bit DDR3)
◦ Flash — 8GB NAND
◦ Expansion — 1x SD slot onboard; 1x SD card interface signals on an expansion connector
• Networking:
◦ 1x 10/100 Ethernet
◦ WiFi 802.11b/g/n
◦ Bluetooth 4.0
• Graphics:
◦ Hardware video decoders — MPEG-2, VC-1, VP8, MPEG-4, H.264 (1080p at 30fps), RV9 (1080p at 60fps)
◦ HDMI port (up to 2k resolution)
• Other I/O:
◦ 2x USB — 1x OTG, 1x Host
◦ 25x GPIOs
◦ CMOS camera input (ITU.R BTU-645 connector)
◦ 2x SPI
◦ 1x I2C
◦ 7x analng input channels
◦ 1x UART
◦ AC97 audio (via I/O jack and HDMI connector)
◦ JTAG (14-pin MIPS EJTAG header)
◦ Transport Stream Interface
• Power — 5VDC
• Dimensions — 90.2 x 95.3mm

Users can order MIPS Creator CI20 from Imagination Technologies web store. The company is planning to ship the device free for selected potential projects. The company may come with some special strategy to let non developer community play and test the board. Until then, the board is available only for selected projects for free.