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 ARM (stylised in lowercase as arm, formerly an acronym for Advanced RISC Machines and originally Acorn RISC Machine) is a family of reduced instruction set computer, RISC instruction set architectures (ISAs) for central processing unit, com ...

and Power ISA-based computing devices. The Genesi Group consists of Genesi USA Inc., Genesi Americas LLC, Genesi Europe UG, Red Efika, bPlan GmbH and the affiliated non-profit organization Power2People. As of 2012, Genesi was an official Linaro partner and its software development team was instrumental in moving Linux on the

towards a wider adoption of the hard-float

application binary interface An application binary interface (ABI) is an interface exposed by software that is defined for in-process machine code access. Often, the exposing software is a library, and the consumer is a program. An ABI is at a relatively low-level of a ...

, which was incompatible with most existing applications but provided large performance gains for many use cases as of 2012.

Products

The main products of Genesi are ARM-based computers that were designed to be inexpensive, quiet and highly energy efficient, and a custom Open Firmware compliant

firmware In computing Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computer, computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and the development of both computer hardware, h ...

. All products can run a multitude of operating systems.

Current products

* Aura – A comprehensive abstraction layer for embedded and desktop devices, with UEFI and IEEE1275. Desktop systems with AGP or PCI/

PCI Express PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), officially abbreviated as PCIe, is a high-speed standard used to connect hardware components inside computers. It is designed to replace older expansion bus standards such as Peripher ...

may take advantage of an embedded x86/ BIOS emulator providing boot functionality for standard graphics cards *EFIKA MX53 *EFIKA MX6

Discontinued products

* EFIKA MX Smarttop – A highly energy efficient and compact computing device (complete system) powered by a Freescale ARM iMX515 CPU * EFIKA MX Smartbook – A 10″ smartbook (complete system) powered by the Freescale ARM iMX515 CPU *High Density Blade – PowerPC based high density blade server *Home Media Center – PowerPC based digital video recorder * EFIKA 5200B – A small Open Firmware-based

motherboard A motherboard, also called a mainboard, a system board, a logic board, and informally a mobo (see #Nomenclature, "Nomenclature" section), is the main printed circuit board (PCB) in general-purpose computers and other expandable systems. It ho ...

powered by a Freescale MPC5200B SoC processor with 128 MB RAM, a 44-pin ATA connector for a 2.5" hard drive, sound in/out, USB,

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 198 ...

serial port A serial port is a serial communication Interface (computing), 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 Pa ...

, and a PCI slot *Open Client –

thin client In computer networking, a thin client, sometimes called slim client or lean client, is a simple (low-Computer performance, performance) computer that has been Program optimization, optimized for Remote desktop, establishing a remote connectio ...

s available with Freescale's Power Architecture or ARM SoCs * Pegasos – An Open Firmware-based MicroATX

microprocessor A microprocessor is a computer processor (computing), processor for which the data processing logic and control is included on a single integrated circuit (IC), or a small number of ICs. The microprocessor contains the arithmetic, logic, a ...

, featuring PCI slots, AGP,

, USB, DDR and FireWire * Open Desktop Workstation – A Pegasos II based computer featuring a Freescale PowerPC 7447 processor. Complete specifications for the hardware are available through Genesi's PowerDeveloper.org website

Community support

Genesi designed and maintains PowerDeveloper, an online platform for Genesi products and ARM products from other manufacturers. Via the PowerDeveloper Projects programs, hundreds of systems have been provided to the PowerDeveloper community so far, thereby supporting open source development in many countries. Linux distributions that directly benefited from the programs include but are not limited to

Crux CRUX is a lightweight x86-64 Linux distribution targeted at experienced Linux users and delivered by a tar.gz-based package system with BSD-style initscripts. It is not based on any other Linux distribution. It also utilizes a ports system ...

Debian Debian () is a free and open-source software, free and open source Linux distribution, developed by the Debian Project, which was established by Ian Murdock in August 1993. Debian is one of the oldest operating systems based on the Linux kerne ...

, Raspbian, Fedora, Gentoo, openSuSE and Ubuntu. Genesi once funded the development of the MorphOS

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

but shifted its focus towards Linux in 2004. However, as of 2011, Genesi remains the main supporter of the operating system and continues to actively support its user and developer communities via the MorphZone social platform, which features discussion forums, a digital library, a software repository and a bounty system.

Notes

{{Reflist, 2 ARM architecture Computer companies of the United States Computer hardware companies Amiga companies

Products

Current products

Discontinued products

Community support

External links

Notes