Imagination Technologies is most well-known for its PowerVR division, In February2013, Imagination acquired MIPS Technologies, masters of the most popular instruction set you've never heard of: MIPS. Being thus possessed of GPU and CPU silicon, it makes strategic sense to release a product with both.
The fruit of its labor is the Creator CI20. As we know this class is dominated by the Raspberry Pi, there are plenty of alternatives though. Many of these, e.g. the Beagle Bone Black and Intel's x86 Galileo, offered a little more computational horse power. But now the Pi has had a reboot and is capable of running a desktop smoothly, these rival boards have lost their raison d'être.
The Creator is powered by a dual core, 32-bit, 1.2GHz CPU, it features 1GB of DDR3 memory and 8GB of NAND storage. Besides that there is an SD card slot, 100Mb Ethernet, 802.11n wireless, Bluetooth, an IR receiver and three USB2.0 ports, two full-sized and one mini. USB On-The-Go is enabled through a jumper, and the mini port is paralleled with one of its larger siblings, so only two ports can be used at once.
The board itself is powered by the same barrel connector as the Sony PSP. As you'd expect there's an HDMI port and a 3.5mm audio jack. There are also all manner of I/O pins for the hard core.
The Creator officially supports Debian, or vice versa, since Debian has supported the MIPS architecture for some time. There are also images available for Gentoo and Arch Linux, as well as the embedded-centric Angstrom and Yocto Sano.
Interestingly there is also an Android 4.4 image available, although being based around the Android Open Source Project you'll have to side load any apps you want. The MIPS architecture is fully supported by Android, but many apps are still compiled solely for ARM, limiting the current potential here. However, those wishing to develop for Android may be tempted by this low cost device, though they'll have to put up with a 5minute (or 1cup of tea) boot time.
Highest on our list of gripes is the board's fussiness over displays: the developers warn that passive HDMI-DVI adapters may not work, but we found at least one monitor that it failed to talk to over HDMI, leading us to suspect that someone broke it. In fact, the 3.0 series kernel shipped with the Debian image can't query EDID data, it is possible to compile your own 3.16 kernel, but at the time of writing this breaks acceleration.
Numerically the Ingenic JZ4780 SoC seems impressive, but comparing the Creator's MIPS architecture to ARM or x86 is akin to comparing apples and oranges. The Raspberry Pi 2's four cores will trump the Creator for multithreaded applications, but floating point-heavy math operations will favor the Creator's FPU. The PowerVR graphics can do 1080p at 60Hz, or 2k at 30Hz, outdoing the more basic Pi output. Booting Debian takes a couple of minutes and the XFCE desktop was sluggish with frequent tearing when moving windows. Games like Supertux and Chromium BSU run fine though, and it does come with some quite impressive 3D demos. One such demo achieved about 9 million triangles a second as so many blocks arrange themselves into various shapes above a valley. But pretty demos alone do not a Pi-conquering board make, and, sad to say, the CI20 Creator's extra features aren't quite justified by the £20price differential.
If not for the Pi 2, this could tempt many hobbyists. It still has a few extra features, but only for a small niche. We gave this a 6.5/10 score.
