Efika is a line of power efficient ARM architecture and Power ISA based computers manufactured by

Genesi Genesi is an international group of technology and consulting companies in the United States, Mexico and Germany. It is most widely known for designing and manufacturing ARM architecture and Power ISA-based computing devices. The Genesi Group co ...

. In Esperanto ''efika'' means "efficacious, effective, or efficient".

EfikaPPC

The EfikaPPC, sometimes also referred to as EFIKA 5200B, was based on a 400 MHz

Freescale Freescale Semiconductor, Inc. was an American semiconductor manufacturer. It was created by the divestiture of the Semiconductor Products Sector of Motorola in 2004. Freescale focused their integrated circuit products on the automotive, embedd ...

MPC5200B

System-on-a-Chip A system on a chip or system-on-chip (SoC ; pl. ''SoCs'' ) is an integrated circuit that integrates most or all components of a computer or other electronic system. These components almost always include a central processing unit (CPU), memory ...

and includes 44-pin 2.5" IDE,

USB Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard that establishes specifications for cables, connectors and protocols for connection, communication and power supply (interfacing) between computers, peripherals and other computers. A broad ...

serial port In computing, a serial port is a serial communication interface through which information transfers in or out sequentially one bit at a time. This is in contrast to a parallel port, which communicates multiple bits simultaneously in parallel. ...

, stereo audio in/out, 100 Mbit/s

Ethernet Ethernet () is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 1 ...

, 33/66 MHz PCI port and 128 MB

DDR DDR or ddr may refer to: *ddr, ISO 639-3 code for the Dhudhuroa language *DDr., title for a double doctorate in Germany *DDR, station code for Dadar railway station, Mumbai, India *' (German Democratic Republic), official name of the former East ...

RAM Ram, ram, or RAM may refer to: Animals * A male sheep * Ram cichlid, a freshwater tropical fish People * Ram (given name) * Ram (surname) * Ram (director) (Ramsubramaniam), an Indian Tamil film director * RAM (musician) (born 1974), Dutch * ...

. EFIKA uses an

Open Firmware Open Firmware is a standard defining the interfaces of a computer firmware system, formerly endorsed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). It originated at Sun Microsystems, where it was known as OpenBoot, and has bee ...

based CHRP compliant firmware with a special

x86 x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel based on the Intel 8086 microprocessor and its 8088 variant. The 8086 was intr ...

/ BIOS

emulator In computing, an emulator is hardware or software that enables one computer system (called the ''host'') to behave like another computer system (called the ''guest''). An emulator typically enables the host system to run software or use pe ...

providing support for standard

graphics cards A graphics card (also called a video card, display card, graphics adapter, VGA card/VGA, video adapter, display adapter, or mistakenly GPU) is an expansion card which generates a feed of output images to a display device, such as a computer moni ...

on an AGP riser slot. The motherboard had a non-standard form factor, 118 mm × 153 mm × 38 mm small. Due to its small size,

Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive The Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive 2002/95/EC (RoHS 1), short for Directive on the restriction of the use of certain hazardous substances in electrical and electronic equipment, was adopted in February 2003 by the European Unio ...

(RoHS) compliance and energy efficient nature (drawing less than 20 Watts with a harddrive and a graphics card, typically less than 10 Watts during most usage scenarios), the Efika was marketed as environmentally friendly. An Efika computer could run a variety of

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also i ...

s including

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

( Gentoo,

openSUSE openSUSE () is a free and open source RPM-based Linux distribution developed by the openSUSE project. The initial release of the community project was a beta version of SUSE Linux 10.0. Additionally the project creates a variety of tools, s ...

, Debian and CRUX PPC),

MorphOS MorphOS is an AmigaOS-like computer operating system (OS). It is a mixed proprietary and open source OS produced for the Pegasos PowerPC (PPC) processor based computer, PowerUP accelerator equipped Amiga computers, and a series of Freescale dev ...

AROS Aros may refer to: *Aros (Middle-earth), a river in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth legendarium * Aros, Mull, the location of Aros Castle, a ruined 13th-century castle on the Isle of Mull, Scotland *AROS Research Operating System, a free software i ...

, OpenSolaris and

QNX QNX ( or ) is a commercial Unix-like real-time operating system, aimed primarily at the embedded systems market. QNX was one of the first commercially successful microkernel operating systems. The product was originally developed in the early ...

. It was sometimes called EFIKA5K2, since it used the

PowerPC e300 The PowerPC e300 is a family of 32-bit PowerPC microprocessor cores developed by Freescale for primary use in system-on-a-chip (SoC) designs with speed ranging up to 800 MHz, thus making them ideal for embedded applications. The e300 is ...

based MPC5200B processor. On September 10, 2007, Genesi announced it discontinued the 5200B and was developing a new product based on the Freescale MPC5121e. It would feature on-board PowerVR MBX video.

Efika MX

In August 2009, the Efika MX Open Client was announced which used the Freescale

i.MX The i.MX range is a family of Freescale Semiconductor (now part of NXP) proprietary microcontrollers for multimedia applications based on the ARM architecture and focused on low-power consumption. The i.MX application processors are SoCs (Sys ...

515 ARM system-on-a-chip. The CPU core ran at 800 MHz,

Wi-Fi Wi-Fi () is a family of wireless network protocols, based on the IEEE 802.11 family of standards, which are commonly used for local area networking of devices and Internet access, allowing nearby digital devices to exchange data by radio wav ...

(802.11 b/g/n) and 512 MB of DDR2 SDRAM were included. The Efika MX

Smartbook A smartbook was a class of mobile device that combined certain features of both a smartphone and netbook computer, produced between 2009 and 2010. Smartbooks were advertised with features such as always on, all-day battery life, 3G, or Wi-Fi conn ...

(small laptop computer) was announced in August 2010. It featured a 1024×600 resolution screen, 16 GB of SSD and 512 MB of DDR2 RAM. It required a maximum operating power consumption of 12 watts (average power consumption around 6 W), and came with software based on

Ubuntu Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed mostly of free and open-source software. Ubuntu is officially released in three editions: '' Desktop'', ''Server'', and ''Core'' for Internet of things devices and robots. All ...

10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" release of Linux. Other Linux distributions are known to work properly on the platform. The drivers and software developed specifically for the platform is available on the company public git at

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continu ...

The Open Client product was also renamed the Efika MX Smarttop. In Europe, the Efika MX Smartbook is marketed as Efika MX Netbook due to trademark disputes.

EfikaPPC

Efika MX

See also

References

External links