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MIPS Creator C120 now available for pre-order

Imagination Technologies £50 Raspberry Pi rival up for pre-order, MIPS Creator C120 shipping in January

Imagination Technologies, the company behind the PowerVR graphics chips found in hundreds of smartphones and audio specialists Pure, has finally opened up pre-orders for the MIPS Creator C120 microcomputer, giving the Raspberry Pi foundation some competition with a souped-up development board capable of running Linux or Android.

Originally announced back in August, the MIPS Creator C120 is a development board aimed at schools, hobbyists and amateur coders looking to develop or expand their skills. With a MIPS processor running at 1.2GHz, PowerVR GPU and 1GB of RAM, it should be more than powerful enough to run the full versions of various Linux distributions, or a vanilla build of Android 4.4 KitKat. Extra power means larger power requirements, but Imagination has managed to get power draw down to a little under 3 watts, even when rendering 3D graphics at 1080p.

The final version has changed from the original prototype board, dropping the amount of on-board flash memory from 8GB to 4GB. The full-size SD card slot, twin USB ports, HDMI and Ethernet remain, as do the 25 GPIO pins and overall 90.2×95.3mm board dimensions. You don’t need to add a Wi-Fi or Bluetooth dongle, as you would with a Raspberry Pi, as both are included on the board as standard.

It may be physically bigger and draw more power than a Pi, but the MIPS Creator C120’s extra CPU grunt could open up a whole host of projects and possibilities for bedroom coders, engineers and school courses.

The MIPS Creator C120 is available to pre-order directly from Imagination Technologies today, and will be shipping to customers from January onwards. Expect to play £50 here in the UK, or $65 excluding shipping in the US.

We’ve got an early test sample, and will be bringing you a full review as soon as we’ve put the board through its paces.

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