I have received two MIPS Creator CI20 boards, thanks to Imagination Technologies. It’s a small MIPS32 development board:
As you can see it comes in a nice packaging with a world-compatible power adapter. It uses a Ingenic JZ4780 SoC with a dual core MIPS32 CPU running at 1.2GHz with a PowerVR SGX540 GPU. The board is fitted with 1GB of RAM, 8GB of NOR flash, HDMI output, USB 2.0 ports, Ethernet + Wi-Fi + BlueTooth, SD card slot, IR receiver, expansion headers and more. The schematics are available. The Linux kernel and the U-Boot bootloader sources are also available.
Powering this board with a USB keyboard, a USB mouse and a HDMI display, it boots off the internal flash on a Debian Wheezy up to the XFCE environment. Besides the kernel, the Wi-Fi + Bluetooth firmware, and very few configuration changes, it runs a vanilla Debian. Unfortunately I haven’t found time to play more with it yet, but it looks already quite promising.
The board has not been formally announced yet, so I do not know when it will become available, nor the price, but if you are interested I’ll bring it to DebConf14. Don’t hesitate to ask me if you want to look at it or play with it.
So what’s the closest thing to a comparable big-endian dev board these days?
It’s not a development board, but you might want to have a look at the EdgeRouter Lite. It comes with 512MB RAM and a dual-core Octeon CPU (MIPS64R2).
Or the EdgeRouter 8pro, which is dual-core 1GHz OcteonII, with SODIMM (can be upgraded to 8Gbytes), and can be booted in either endian! (the little endian patches are in preparation for upstreaming…) It does cost more than the EdgeRouter3/Lite though.
If you are doing ‘tiny’ stuff then maybe check out boards like carambola2 or VoCore which are big endian 32bit but do not have the capacity (I believe – RAM or flash etc.) to run Debian. OK for OpenWRT though etc.
Board is announced and ‘request a board’ page is now active on imgtec.com – you can find a link from the elinux.org CI20 pages. Currently you can ‘only’ get them for free though (if you have a project etc.) – not yet for purchase…