SheevaPlug
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4Home, Marvell partner for energy monitoring plug computer
If you asked Intel what this is, the company would tell you it's an experimental power sensor; if you asked a storage guru, they'd ID it as the PogoPlug. Truth be told, it's a miniature Linux computer designed by Marvell -- who's apparently decided to beat Intel at the former function. Through a partnership with 4Home, Marvell's latest 2GHz SheevaPlug will become a smart meter that measures power consumption right from the outlet, ostensibly allowing you to figure out which blasted light the kids left on this time without shoving a pricey home automation kit into your walls. No word on how much it'll cost to keep tabs on your energy bill or when you'll be able to do it, but we'll ask those important questions and more when we see the device for ourselves later this week. PR after the break.
Marvell's SheevaPlug Linux PC fits in its power adapter
Marvell has the technology and the vision, and if the company gets its way the world will soon be overrun by lilliputian Linux machines. Hiding in wall warts and the like, these guys will begin quietly taking over tasks that we once relegated to servers and desktop machines. To this end, the company has just announced that they'll be making the SheevaPlug dev kit available. This is the platform that PogoPlug is based on, consisting of a 1.2GHz Kirkwood processor, 512MB flash storage, 512MB DRAM, a Gigabit Ethernet port, and USB 2.0. This bad boy supports many standard Linux 2.6 kernel distributions, and the whole thing plugs directly into a standard wall socket, drawing "less than one tenth of the power of a typical PC" while in use. Currently available for $99, the company says that it anticipates a price drop to $49 "in the near future."
