Marvell SheevaPlug: $99 Linux PC Hidden In A Wall-Wart

Marvell have been talking up their SheevaPlug reference design, a wall-wart power plug that actually hides an entire Linux PC.  Priced at $99, inside the SheevaPlug there's an ARM-based 1.2GHz Sheeva embedded processor, 512MB of DDR2 memory, 512MB of flash storage, gigabit ethernet and USB 2.0; in fact the development kit is available now.

Eventually, prices are expected to drop to around $49.  Among the first products to hit the market based on the Sheeva plug-computer design will be the Pogoplug, which so impressed us back at CES 2009.  The Pogoplug is designed to simply take a USB hard-drive and turn it into network attached storage, accessible not only from the home network but through a web-based portal.  It's expected to cost around $99 when it launches in a few months time, but preorders are being taken at just $79.

Meanwhile expect the SheevaPlug to find plenty of new fans among the open-source community; it'll play nicely with "multiple standard Linux 2.6 kernel distributions".  Its eco-credentials are good, too, with Marvell claiming it uses less than one tenth of the power of a typical PC being used as a home server.

[via The Tech Report]