As the old adage goes don’t buy anything until V3 comes out.
Let’s assume that the V3 product is due in about 18 months from now (2015Q2).
By this time a number of interesting things should have happened:
- SoC (System on a chip) RAM sizes will have grown to 4Gb.
- mSATA disk sizes will be doubled (For db / metadata storage)
- Quad core ARM processor
- Windows 10 / Windows Nano merge to make a small footprint, ARM based Windows machine
This gives the real prospect of a small headless Core (let’s call it the Kernel)
So. This Kernel would act very similar to today’s Core except:
- Headless - initial configure via HTTP then leave alone.
- All audio held on NAS / SMB shares (or Tidal / other streaming services)
- No audio out (or possibly Asynchronous USB)
- Wired gigabit Ethernet.
Physically the Kernel would be little more than a next generation Raspberry PI / Beadlebone Black in a nice case (RF radiation etc) with a non switched mode PSU (RF again).
Roonlabs would supply a disk image and the hardware could be produced by a third party.
Indeed the configuration could be held in the cloud so there would be no need for even a web server on the Kernel - just go to https://setup.roonlabs.com which could use some IP address fun to ‘know’ which Kernel is on the same subnet as the user.
The big advantages e of Kernel over Core (for me) are:
1. Cost - hardware would be pretty much off the shelf and SoC based so very cheep
2. Small, quiet, headless
3. Updates via the cloud, so no onward maintenance
Cheers,
Rik