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Marvell gets into tiny home server market

by on25 February 2009

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Announces the SheevaPlug PC dev kit


Marvell is more well known for its network controllers and more recently mobile device processors than its other product ranges, but it seems like the company is expanding into new areas all the time and its SheevaPlug PC is a rather interesting development.

This tiny computer is the size of a large power adaptor (it does plug straight into a wall socket, so this makes sense) and it incorporates a 1.2GHz Marvell Kirkwood SoC (also known as the 88F6281). The Kirkwood SoC is based on Marvell's Sheeva CPU core which has 32kb L1 cache and 256kb L2 cache. It supports DDR2 memory with speeds of up to 800MHz and some other interesting features such as Gigabit Ethernet, PCI Express, SDIO, USB 2.0, SATA II and a range of other things.

However, the SheevaPlug PC doesn't quite come with all the features supported by the SoC, as Marvell is intending it not to be a small, affordable PC, but instead they want to make it into a low cost digital media storage server. The dev kit comes with 512MB of flash memory, 512MB of DDR2 400MHz RAM, a Gigabit Ethernet port, an SDIO slot, a USB 2.0 port and a mini USB 2.0 port, that's it. It will run Linux and Marvell claims that the dev kit is compatible with a wide range of Kernel 2.6 based distributions.

The idea behind the SheevaPlug PC is that you plug it in, attach it to your router/switch and then hook up an external USB 2.0 hard drive to it and use it to share digital files around your home. The deal here is that Marvell claims that the SheevaPlug PC draws less than one tenth of the power of even a really basic x86 based home server and we have no reason to doubt them on this.

Will it take off? Well, as of right now you can purchase the dev kit for $99 (€77/£68), but if a manufacturer picks up the idea and mass manufacture these things, we'd guess the price would be even lower. In our opinion it has a good chance to become popular with those that don't have too high demands and want a cheap, quiet, low-power home server.

You can find the product page here

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Last modified on 25 February 2009
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