[PD] PengPod Linux tablet, hopefully coming soon

[katja]

We're still struggling with the Raspberry Pi and yet another lovely
device is announced, the PengPod Linux tablet:

http://www.pengpod.com/products/pengpod700
http://www.pengpod.com/products/pengpod1000

Pengpods have an Allwinner A10 chip with ARM cortex-a8 CPU. Same
single core CPU as in the earliest iPad. A10 specs:

http://www.allwinnertech.com/product/a10.html

ARM cortex-a8 reportedly has two coprocessors which can both do
floating point operations: the non-pipelined VFPv3 unit and the
pipelined NEON unit for integer and 32 bit float SIMD processing. You
must convince the compiler to do the bulk of the work on the NEON
unit, for speed. That is a matter of compiler flags and coding habits.
See for example this (old) article:

http://pandorawiki.org/Floating_Point_Optimization

Though PengPod will be more powerful than Raspberry Pi, in terms of
hardware it is still a toy like iPad and Android tablets, which could
never attract my interest. So what makes me looking forward to the
PengPod so much? It must be the operating system. Good old GNU tools,
Synaptic, and all the packages so helpful to use a computer in the way
you want it. Such tiny devices, still able to run a full Linux, it's
just cute.


Katja