Tо say the world of hobbyist-orientated, single-board computers is monopolised by ARM's multitudinous licensees is no exaggeration: from the freshly announced Raspberry Pi 2 through to the Nvidia Jetson TK1, the overwhelming majority of boards use a variant of the ARM architecture for their processor. The majority, but not all; the Gizmo Explorer Kit, an open-hardware creation built in partnership with AMD, was one famous exception that has now received an update.
The first factorto note about the Gizmo2 is that it no longer comes as a bundle package. The original Gizmo board was available exclusively as a kit put together by embedded development expert Sage Electronics. Buyers got a prototyping board that connected to a low-speed expansion header, and a time-limited JTAG debugger probe hat required registration to use beyond the first 24 hours.
The Gizmo 2, by contrast, is sold solus, packaged with nothing more than a power supply, a 4GB micro-SD card with the OS pre-loaded and a battery for the handy on-board real-time clock. Buyers also get a surprisingly bulky heatsink pre-applied to the board, featuring one of the less welcome changes from the original model: an annoyingly whiny cooling fan.
The fan is there to cool the new system-on-chip processor, AMD's dual-core 64-bit CX-210HA running at 1GHz. The chip has a 9W thermal design profile (TDP), and includes integrated Radeon HD 8210E graphics hardware with a promised 85 gigaflops of compute performance, and it's clear that the Gizmo 2's designers didn't want to take the risk of passive cooling.
The use of an industry-standard AMD64 x86 chip means the Gizmo 2 also has compatibility its ARM-based rivals can't match. Although I used Ubuntu 14.10 for testing, any standard operating system should, in theory, boot on the system -including Windows 8.1 and the upcoming Windows 10.
The 9W SoC also packs a heck of a punch: single-threaded SysBench performance hit a 95th percentile time of 2.08ms, a significant improvement on the 9.87ms of the original Gizmo and even faster than Nvidia's impressive Tegra KTs time of 7.31ms. Network throughput too is desktop-class at 896Mb/sec - a breath of fresh air after the usual disappointment of 'Gigabit' Ethernet ports on ARM-based SBCs hitting highs of around 600Mb/sec at best.
Naturally, the Gizmo 2's main selling point as a development beard is its connections. The usual ports are present and correct - a 12V power input, two USB 3 and two USB 2 ports with a further pair available via an on-board header, an HDMI port, analogue audio, Gigabit Ethernet and a micro-SD port for storage - along with the same high and low-speed connectors as its predecessor.
These edge connectors are designed to mate with PCI-E (in terms of shape rather than function) slots on add-on modules, and carry signals ranging from GPIO and SPI all the way through to SATA and USB 3. Without the Explorer board of the original Gizmo bundle, however, using even the low-speed signals from these connectors is a pain for hobbyists, and near-impossible without buying or building your own break-out board.
Another change from the original design is the removal of the SATA connector, although a SATA 2 signal is still present on the highspeed connector.
In its place, the Gizmo 2 has an mSATA-compatible mini PCI-E slot on the underside of the board, with screw points for half and full-length cards.
There are a few niggles to be found with the Gizmo 2, though, sadly. The board uses a cut-down SeaBios, which caused a few issues during testing: an Ubuntu Live USB drive would failed to boot until I manually intervened to bypass the graphical menu and load the installer manually, while a USB storage device with a copy of Ubuntu installed on it would boot from the slower USB 2 ports but notthe high-speed USB 3 ports - an issue I was actively investigating with the CizmoSphere team but had not yet resolved at the time of writing.
The Gizmo 2, then, is an odd duck. It's more expensive than rival desktop-class compact computing devices, such as Intel's NUC, but with slower performance, and it's less friendly to hobbyists than low-cost devices such as the Raspberry Pi.
For people willing to take the time, however, or who need that rare combination of GPIO capabilities and Windows compatibility, it has plenty to offer - but don't sit it right next to your desk, like I did, as that fan is truly annoying.