The Allwinner A13 is a 1 GHz Cortex A8 processor in a TQFP package: that is to say it’s a chip with pins sticking out the side, which could be soldered onto a board by hand. This opens up the possibility of constructing a full-blown modern computer of one’s own design, by hand, for the first time since the early 1980s.
I had this idea last year about building a single-board cluster, linking a grid of microcontrollers using their SPI buses… but with a chip like this one, you could get a much higher-powered solution for a very similar price, using the onboard gig-Ethernet as the bus.
Back in the day, I built a Z80 cluster using UARTS. I had 4 Z80’s running in “parallel”.
These beasts would make a very nice system!
Comment by Wardy — April 29, 2012 @ 4:21 am