Intel's MinnowBoard Max coming in late, commanding higher prices

Intel is adding more distributors so the board will be available worldwide, the company spokesman said.

The MinnowBoard Max is an upgrade to the original MinnowBoard, which shipped last August with a 4-year-old Atom chip. The new board has Atom E3800 chips based on the latest Bay Trail architecture.

Other features on the board include DDR3 RAM, integrated graphics, a USB 3.0 slot, Gigabit Ethernet and HDMI ports, and 8MB of SPI flash memory for system firmware. It also has a PCI-Express 2.0 slot and SATA controllers. Other expansion options include UARTs and GPIO ports.

Like its predecessor, the MinnowBoard Max is open-source hardware, and Intel has published schematics of the board design so it can be easily replicated.

Intel also sells the Galileo Gen2 board, which runs on the Quark CPU. Intel and MicrosoftMicrosoft jointly developed the $299 Sharks Cove board, which can be ordered but has not yet shipped. Alles zu Microsoft auf CIO.de