Chip designer Imagination equips development board with dual-core MIPS-soc

The British chip designer Imagination has released a cheap development board under the name Creator CI20 based on a 1.2GHz MIPS processor. The ‘Raspberry Pi competitor’ can run Debian 7 and Android 4.4 by default, according to Imagination.

The board of the Creator CI20 measures 90.2×95.3mm. The CI20 includes an Ingenic JZ4780 soc clocked at 1.2GHz. The processor contains two computing cores and a PowerVR SGX 540 GPU, and is built on the 32-bit MIPS architecture. The board also contains 1GB DDR3 memory and 8GB Nand-flash memory. The storage is expandable via an SD or microSD card.

The CI20 has two USB 2.0 ports, one of which is suitable for USB on-the-go, and a 100Mbit Ethernet connection. A chip for 802.11n WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0 is also placed on the motherboard. Furthermore, the CI20 contains 25 gpio connections, two SPI buses, infrared and an HDMI connection. A 5V adapter is required to power the development board.

According to Imagination, developers can directly boot Android 4.4 or Debian 7 from the internal flash memory or an SD card. Other Linux variants would also run, including Gentoo, Yocto and Arch. The CI20 will have a price tag of 50 pounds, converted 63 euros.