Pandaboard ES Launches Packing ARM A9 Power

Pandaboard.org has unveiled a new and small mainboard that is called the Pandaboard ES. This little board is one of the open source parts that is designed to be a development tool for running Android 4.0 ICS when it lands. The board is intended to support the Android Open Source Project. The little board is price very well.

It will cost you $182 and has the hardware onboard with a dual-core TI OMAP4460 processor at 1.2GHz and more. The new board has major improvements compared to the original with a claimed 20% increase in overall performance and a 25% increase in graphics performance. The board also uses 1GB of LPDDR2 memory and has a SysBoot switch to allow manual boot order selection.

Connectivity options include HDMI v1.3, DVI-D, and more. It also has a USB host and a USB OTG host inside. It will support WiFi and Bluetooth. The board is available globally starting today. This should make for a very nice development platform at the sub $200 price.