From MAKE: Introducing the Gooseberry Board

Seems like there are a number of low power ARM SoC boards hitting the market recently. If the BeagleBone, Raspberry Pi, and Via APC piqued your interest, you might want to also take a look at the recently announced Gooseberry. It’s an Allwinner A10 ARM SoC with 512MB RAM, 4GB onboard flash (up to 16GB with MicroSD), b/g/n Wifi, and goes for £40 (about $63USD).

Details on availability are forthcoming, but they’re soliciting feedback to gauge interest. Supposedly the whole thing came about because of the current availability of some existing boards. Lacking a reference design, the project lead noticed that the SoC was being used in a production tablet, so instead of stuffing them into an off brand device, they’re being made available as a bare board. [via GeekyGadgets]

from MAKE

From MAKE: Inductively Charged PVC LED Lantern Mod

Fifteen-year-old John Duffy is the subject of Gadget Freak Case #216, over at Design News, with his clever modification of Steve Hoefer’s Eternal Flame Indestructible LED Lantern from MAKE Vol 30. Though Steve’s “floating throwies” can be opened, when the coin cell is dead, to change it out, John’s wirelessly-rechargeable version is both greener (because you don’t have to throw out the dead battery) and tougher (because it can actually be glued closed). See the full build deets at the link, below, and Steve’s original project here. [via Hack a Day]

 

from MAKE

From Engadget: Calxeda benchmarks claim that its server chips are 15 times more power efficient than Intel’s

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Calxeda may have been given the bum’s rush by HP’s Project Moonshot, but the company isn’t taking it lying down. It’s released benchmarks for its ARM-based server technology that claims it’s 15 times more power-efficient than the comparable Intel Xeon. Rigging up a 1.1GHz Energycore ECX-1000 with 4GB RAM against a 3.3GHz Xeon E3-1240, the former consumed only 5.26 W compared to the 102 W of Intel’s high-spec chip. While it certainly wasn’t faster, power efficiency is a key concern for data centers looking to keep costs down, and if the trend continues, Santa Clara will come to regret AMD’s recently announced love-in.

 

from Engadget