China's version of Pi is coming but based on MIPS.

[lilzz]

China's version of Raspberry Pi based on their MIPS instead ARM CPU, loongson.
One of friend point me to this website.

http://www.loongson.cn/news_info.php?id=260

It's written in Chinese but you can see the diagram, Pi look alike, and then Arduino,

I wonder if they would use Python like the Pi. I wonder what kind of os they would use? Shouldn't be too hard to compile a linux for MIPS system.

[rpdom]

I wonder what kind of os they would use? Shouldn't be too hard to compile a linux for MIPS system.

Quite possibly Debian Wheezy. It does have a MIPS version.

[jamesh]

Looks like the guts of a router or similar- they use a lot of MIPS chips.

Yet another cheap nasty clone I expect. At least this one hasn't slavishly copied the Raspi form factor, unlike the the B-Pi (which is pretty pants I've heard).

[fruitoftheloom]

"Shouldn't be too hard to compile a linux for MIPS system"

MiPS Linux has been around for years, a quick google would of found info, jeez!

http://www.linux-mips.org/wiki/Main_Page

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT

"A main design goal of NT was hardware and software portability. Various versions of NT family operating systems have been released for a variety of processor architectures, initially IA-32, MIPS, and DEC Alpha, with PowerPC, Itanium, x86-64 and ARM supported in later releases."

[plugwash]

Pi look alike

Doesn't look anything like a Pi to me.

[dan3008]

mmm, I'm keeping an eye on that. If its cheap, might be good for some things. But I still prefer the pi

[plugwash]

Quite possibly Debian Wheezy. It does have a MIPS version.

Debian does have a mips version but they have been having issues recently with finding good buildd hardware that has decent performance, sufficient memory and is stable. They also have issues with finding experianced manpower to deal with things like openjdk.

[scruss]

Yet another cheap nasty clone I expect. …

Well, the archbeards at GNU are very keen on the Longsoon MIPS stuff since it meets their very tortured definition of “free”. Of course, no silicon can be guaranteed to be free of backdoors unless you fabbed it yourself, but that's a hardware problem, and consequently of little import.

[Jessie]

I think human error can open up a lot of unintentional back doors. Loongson makes some interesting mips chips for desktop use. Some have special functions for speeding up qemu x86 emulation. The linked article says it is based on the Godson 1C core. I will have to look into its specs later.

[cyrano]

There is a significant opening in the Chinese market. A Chinese government agency promoting a home-grown Linux variant (forgot the name) has recently been closed down for fraud. It had a multi-million dollar budget, but all the money was gone, together with some of the people running the show. The distro is not "gone", but there will be no new versions.

Couple that to a large local replacement market for dying Windows XP PC's and someone just might be making serious money creating an "appliance". These guys? Dunno. There's thousands of other "platforms" sprouting all over the place.

As far as I can tell, their main selling point seems to be "Arduino + Raspberry + ZigBee + ..."
Since it's aimed at developers, they only really need one hit. And then everybody will be copying them