Samsung has rolled out a dev board powered by its flagship 1.7 GHz Exynos 5 Dual system-on-chip (SoC).
The Exynos 5 Dual SoC is based on ARM's dual-core Cortex-A15 MPCore chip design, as well as ARM's quad-core Mali-T604 GPU.
Additional specs include 2GB of RAM, HDMI, USB, SATA, Serial and JTAG connectors, as well as support for 802.11a/b/g/n WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0 and WiFi direct.
Priced at a reasonable $249, Arndale - which runs Android Jelly Bean - is targeted at the open source mobile developer community and can be used a test platform for gaming, security and multimedia apps.
"[Arndale] gives developers access to a complete dual-core Cortex-A15 processor and Mali-T604 GPU platform with features not usually found on other community platforms, including NFC, GPS and a camera sensor," explained Samsung exec TH Kim.
"This inexpensive solution paves the way for an entirely new generation of middleware software and applications to be developed in an open source environment."
According to Kim, the Exynos 5 Dual SoC delivers "an order of magnitude lift" in performance, while leading the way in GPU compute as the first SoC capable of full profile OpenCL.
As Liliputing's Brad Linder points out, Samsung's Arndale does seem similar to the open source PandaBoard project, although the latest Panda is based on a TI OMAP 4 ARM Cortex-A9 chip.
"Yes, future versions may include OMAP 5 ARM Cortex-A15 designs, but at this point the Samsung board is one of the first Cortex-A15 boards available to developers," he added.
