I have been meaning to review the CI20 for a while, but I wanted to wait for pricing details to be announced. The CI20 is clearly going to be compared to other single board computers (think Rpi, BeagleBone etc), but the CI20's price will be a deciding factor in how successful it is, as well as how it compares to its competition. Imagination Technologies announced today the price of the CI20 (£50 / $65) as well as when it will be available (January 2015).
Specification
The CI20 boasts an impressive specification - at the heart of which is an Ingenic JZ4780 SoC - a 1.2Ghz XBurst MIPS32 processor paired with a PowerVR SGX GPU. The CI20 also has 1GB of DDR3 RAM and 8GB NAND storage - as well as a plethora of I/O connectors. A full list of the CI20's spec can be found on the excellent eLinux page. |
Image from Ingenic Semiconductor, all rights reserved |
Below is a table that was provided by Imagination Technologies when they announced the CI20. It compares the CI20's specifications to those of its nearest rivals:
What's in the box?
Inside of the CI20's box I received:- The CI20 itself
- A power supply with multiple plug faces
- A USB-to-serial adapter
Initial Boot
As my monitor doesn't have HDMI support, I connected up the serial-to-USB adapter to the CI20's main expansion pins - as is detailed here. It is useful to note that the CI20's expansion pin header is compatible with that of the Raspberry Pi. I then plugged in the power supply and an ethernet cable.On my laptop I loaded up minicom and issued the following command:
minicom -b 115200 -o -D /dev/ttyUSB0
After getting serial access, I was presented with the following prompt:
I logged in using the default credentials (user: ci20, password: ci20) and proceeded to install the latest updates, an SSH server and a VNC server. The CI20 runs Debian with XFCE4 and comes bundled with some graphics demos, I haven't had time to try those out yet though.
Exploring
After installing ssh, I unplugged my CI20's serial connector, left it plugged into ethernet and used SSH to access it from my laptop. I ran a few commands to look at the board's specs. | |
| cat /proc/cpuinfo |
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| cat /proc/meminfo |
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| uname -a |
After some initial exploring over SSH, it was time to connect to the CI20 using VNC to take a look at it running XFCE.
Summary
Throughout the time I spent with the CI20, I was constantly reminded of how it outclasses other single board computers. Comparing it to my Raspberry Pi (admittedly it is only a Model B), made it apparent how quick the CI20 feels. The hardware offerings of the CI20 are far superior to the other single board computers that I have mentioned in this article - although it is more expensive.With this being the first device to come out of the Creator programme, not all distributions are supported and neither are all packages. The eLinux distro page mentions support for: Arch, Debian, Gentoo, Yocto and Angstrom - at the time of writing. There is also an ongoing effort to port XMBC to the CI20. Android is also supported, but I haven't got around to loading this on and trying it.
I'm also slightly concerned about the use of a PowerVR GPU - history isn't kind to the PowerVR architecture with it receiving lots of flak from the open source community as a result of drivers being provided in the form of binary blobs. Only time will tell if Imagination Technologies will continue to port the binary blob to newer kernel versions.
I have a few ideas for projects that I want to complete with the CI20 and will post the results of those here soon.
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