Cotton Candy (single-board computer)

The Cotton Candy is a very small, fanless single-board computer on a stick, putting the full functions of a personal computer on a device the size of a USB memory stick, manufactured by the Norwegian-based hardware and software for-profit startup company FXI Technologies (also referred to as just "FXI Tech").

Cotton Candy

Common manufacturers	ARM Holdings
Design firm	FXI Technologies
Introduced	Cotton Candy November 17, 2011 (2011-11-17)[1][2]
Cost	~US$199 ERP
Type	Single-board computer
Processor	Samsung Exynos 4210
Frequency	1.2 GHz
Memory	1 GB DRAM
Coprocessor	Mali-400 MP GPU VFPv3 (VFP/FPU) NEON SIMD Hardware Audio / Video Decoder Thumb-2 inst. set Jazelle DBX Jazelle RCT TrustZone CESA
Ports	HDMI 1.3a WiFi 802.11 b/g/n Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR USB 2.0 host/device Micro USB MicroSD SDXC slot
Weight	21 g (0.74 oz)
Dimensions	80 mm (3.1 in) (h) 25 mm (0.98 in) (w) 10 mm (0.39 in) (d)

Overview

Cotton Candy is a low-power ARM architecture CPU based computer which uses dual-core processors such as the dual-core 1.2 GHz Exynos 4210 (45 nm ARM Cortex-A9 with 1MB L2 cache) system on a chip (SoC) by Samsung, featuring a quad-core 200 MHz ARM Mali-400 MP GPU OpenGL ES 2.0 capable 2D/3D graphics processing unit, an audio and video decoder hardware engine, and TrustZone Cryptographic Engine and Security Accelerator (CESA) co-processor. The platform is said to be able to stream and decode H.264 1080p content, and be able to use desktop-class interfaces such as KDE or GNOME under Linux.^{[3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15]}

FXI Technologies claims it will run both Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) and the latest Ubuntu Desktop Linux operating systems, leveraging Linaro builds and Linux kernel optimizations.^[5][6][16]

As of 13 September 2012, FXI started to ship to those that pre-ordered devices. At the time of writing (November 2013), the Cotton Candy is generally available. FXI have also made a Beta android ICS image and Beta Linux image available for download.^[17]

On 16 of July 2014, FXI declared bankruptcy.^{[18][citation needed]}

Reception

In January 2012 the Cotton Candy made it to the top-10 finalist at the "Last Gadget Standing" new technology competition at CES 2012.^[19][20] Also at CES 2012, LaptopMag.com made Cotton Candy a top-10 finalist for its "Readers’ Choice for Best of CES 2012" award.^[21] EFYTimes News Network as well named FXI Technologies Cotton Candy a "Top 10 Gadgets Launched @ CES 2012".^[22]

See also

• Exynos, system-on-a-chip by Samsung used in Cotton Candy