[HH] tablet cluster

[Tom Metro]

Tom Metro wrote:
> Brian mentioned picking up a Coby Android tablet for $120, which he
> thought performed pretty well, and thought the $150 ~ $180 Pandaboards
> were comparatively overpriced. (There are other Android tablets in the
> same price range with even faster CPUs.)

My recollection is that the Cobys come with old versions of Android,
slow CPUs, and not much RAM. (The screen resolution is also lousy, but
irrelevant here.)

Here's an example of a bit more updated tablet that runs Android 4.0
selling for $120:
http://www.outletpc.com/ws6548.html

It has a Cortex-A8 processor and Mali-400MP GPU (no clock rates
specified, but I'm guessing 1 GHz), and only 512MB of RAM, so still
pretty weak.

There are probably better options on eBay.

6 to 12 months from now we'll probably see dual-core parts with 1 GB RAM
in the same price range. Quad core with 4 GB RAM would start to get
interesting.

It does make you wonder, if they can produce hardware like this for
$120, what you might be able to accomplish by leveraging volume
production on higher-end hardware.

For example, what if you went to ASUS and asked for 1000 of their 4-core
Tegra-based tablet motherboards with any unnecessary hardware (like GPS,
WiFi, HDMI connectors, etc.) omitted. They've got all the tooling and
automation already in place, and the supply chain already lined up.
Maybe a "name brand" supplier like ASUS wouldn't accommodate this
request, but I bet you could find an off brand Chinese manufacturer that
would. Seems conceivable you could hit a $100 price point doing this
sort of thing.

One of the big challenges would be getting some sort of high-speed
interconnect, as tablet boards usually don't have Ethernet. Maybe you
could get creative and figure out how to repurpose HDMI for this. (Is it
even a bi-directional port?) USB 3.0?

 -Tom