First deliveries of minicomputer ‘Chip’ started

The minicomputer ‘Chip’ that cost 9 dollars in a Kickstarter campaign is on its way to the first group of backers. The gem of the company Next Thing Co. is a computer of six by four centimeters with a 1GHz ARM processor, 512MB working memory and 4GB storage.

This first batch of ‘Alpha Chips’ will go to the so-called Kernel Hacker Backers, says Dave Rauchwerk of Next Thing Co. in an update on Kickstarter. This first shipment of the minicomputer will not be flashed, but there is enough documentation to do that yourself. The Kernel Hacker Backers get a second Chip a few weeks later, in mid-October. Other backers will receive their Chip sometime in December.

The Chip runs on a Debian-based Linux version, Linux Buildroot, but given the board’s open source nature, it shouldn’t be long before other distros can run on it. In addition to the single-core 1GHz chip from Allwinner with Cortex A8-core, the board uses a Mali-400 GPU and therefore has support for OpenGL ES2.0.

In a short interview with Make, Rauchwerk explains that the Kernel Hacker Backers get two instead of one Chip to test the supply chain.