Sharks Cove – Tablet Development Board | Hacker News Reader

Sharks Cove – Tablet Development Board

sharkscove.org

24 pointsartimaeis18 comments

Not quite - this might just be a board used by Microsoft as a high-powered test for shrinking Windows, but it's not the "Internet of Things" board that they've been talking about. That's this:

http://ms-iot.github.io/content/SetupGalileo.htm

It's a cheaper device, and it's about $70. It runs an even slimmer version of Windows. So it's much more a competitor with the Raspberry Pi than other Windows development boards (i.e.: this $300 one.)

Right. No way I'm breadboarding this up at $300 per "Thing"

This appears to be a solid workbench device for developing add-on hardware (and the drivers to communicate with it)

The desire to compare to RaspPi is understood, especially when it plays into my preconceptions of the difficulty of Windows development. This thing is a monster.

http://www.raspberrypi.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/rsz_b-... http://www.mouser.com/images/circuitco/lrg/595-SHARKSCOVE-PR...

Don't forget the Gadgeteer stuff MS has had for quite a while. It's pretty cool for rapidly prototyping "things".

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/gadgeteer/

More information: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windows_hardware_and_driver_develope...

Can someone explain why you'd utilise that board in order to develop Windows Drivers rather than just a generic x86-64 PC with a serial connection for kernel debugging?

For $300 you can easily buy a fully functional PC. Particularly if you don't care too much about the spec.

It's a small computer on a single board, but it's geared towards the high end as far as performance and features go. From the Arduinos, the RasPis, the BanPis, Beagleboards, to small but full-fledged Atom boards it's a huge spectrum.

It's absolutely great that we have so many great systems to choose from, but I'm not sure one is really a "response" to the other.

For example, the Raspberry Pi hits the sweet spot for me as far as home automation things go - it is reasonably powerful enough to run all the software I need including a full web stack, but it has a really low power consumption. For a media station I'd probably choose a Banana Pi instead. The Sharks Cove looks like a great solution if you have to run a minimal Windows (of course).

Edit: the title has been changed so it no longer references the Pi, making parts of this post moot. Still, I'm leaving it as it was.

I'm not sure why people even bother bringing up RasPi and its ilk here. It's very clearly targeted towards a different audience: professionals who need to develop hardware/drivers for Intel tablets. Just look at all of the headers they've broken out, the test points on the board, the LED display for bus/early boot debugging, etc. The Raspberry Pi was designed with extensibility in mind, designed so the headers are on one side of the board so it can be enclosed sensibly, no extraneous functionality, simple construction, etc. This thing is just a reference tablet board minus the touchpanel, with all of it's I/O ports exposed.

You certainly can built Quark/Atom SBCs into a "RasberryPi" like device, but this is not the device you were looking for. It's a terrible hobbyist board. Perhaps some one will use this board to develop a decent hobbyist Atom SBC/"NUC" - Intel's certainly has enough publicly available documentation to make it happen now.

I "bothered" because the Pi was explicitly used as a target for comparison in the original title of this thread.

And I'm not sure where the hostility is coming from, but my point was actually similar to yours, minus the abrasive attitude. My comment was about different capabilities and use cases, and I criticized the label "Raspberry Pi" in this context - which, in case you missed it, was in the original title of this thread.

> You certainly can built Quark/Atom SBCs into a "RasberryPi" like device, but this is not the device you were looking for.

In no part of my comment did I remotely advocate or even hint at anything like that.

> And I'm not sure where the hostility is coming from

I'm not sure how you read hostility, but okay.

> In no part of my comment did I remotely advocate or even hint at anything like that.

And you obviously missed the thinly veiled Star Wars reference. Perhaps next time I'll put it in quotes.

> And you obviously missed the thinly veiled Star Wars reference. Perhaps next time I'll put it in quotes.

Your statement "You certainly can built Quark/Atom SBCs into a "RasberryPi" like device" was supposed to counter an argument I never made. Yeah, it's petty, but I felt the need to point that out. Obviously, this is not in any shape or form about your Star Wars reference.

> I'm not sure how you read hostility, but okay.

It's my impression. It may well be wrong, but here's how I read it:

You come across as hostile in a number of ways. The issue above is a good example. I perceive your comment as passive aggressive, but more importantly you drag the discussion to areas that are beside the point. It feels like you corrected me about positions I never expressed, and when I criticized this you switched yet again to something unrelated and attacked that.

What I dislike about these maneuvers is that they work. If done right, this combination of abrasiveness and well-executed straw men can get you pretty far in most forums, including this one.

> I perceive your comment as passive aggressive, but more importantly you drag the discussion to areas that are beside the point.

And that's not what you're doing with this entire post? You keep trying to turn this into some kind of nerd fight when my comment was nothing but a statement of facts.

And there are plenty of wintel boards that have launched in the past that have failed to reach a fraction of the audience that Pi or even Beagleboard has. Even the android board seems more realistic than this it seems wee bit over engineered for the purposes or is missing the things to truly make it unique and at the price advertized they could have done more I would have thought.

So it is gut of used pc laptop you can farm on eBay (probably with a functioning LCD as a plus), for a price of shining new Chromebook.

Don't compare apples and oranges - this board is not meant as a pc-equivalent.

It's selling point are the numerous UART- and GPIO-Ports. This is a DevBoard, not some random mainboard.

Go figure the m$ response costs 10x more

I hear ya, but it does include the ability to develop drivers which is pretty cool.

And does support android as well as windows so I will give them that. But really they could not have done ANYTHING to bring the cost down a little bit?

That board is probably being sold under cost. Look at how much stuff is crammed onto that PCB! It looks like there's a large BGA bridge chip (southbridge?) on there as well as a bunch of large perpipheral controllers. And what's with that odd chip-on-board module directly south of the Atom? It's missing from this previous picture of the board:

http://files.linuxgizmos.com/intel_sharkscove_front.jpg

Compare this to a recent ARM quad-core A9 board, where a lot of the peripheral stuff is on the SoC (oh, and it has Wifi/Bt on board)

http://boundarydevices.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Nit6Ma...

(Just a small plug for Boundary Devices here, their stuff is excellent. This is their new Nitrogen6_MAX, $249.).

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