PC-in-a-plug coming soon to a wall near you

CALIFORNIAN COMPANY MARVELL has been talking about the possibility of cramming a PC's innards into a box the size of a wall wart for a while now, but it looks like the concept has finally become a reality.

The Plug Computer is about the size of a largish external power supply unit, and the first commercially-available version, based on the Sheevaplug development platform, will use a Marvell Kirkwood processor with an embedded 1.2GHz Sheeva CPU equipped with 512 MB of flash and 512MB of DRAM.

Judging from the USB 2.0 and Gigabit Ethernet ports which are the only external clues to differentiate this from the power unit that came with your Christmas tree lights, Marvell intends this little box to sit between your network and a hard drive or other storage solution, effectively turning any old cheapo HDDs into a network drive.

And the Linux-powered box draws so little power, you won't be killing a polar bear if you leave it on all night.

Marvell has a number of development partners working on the project, including storage and networking specialist Buffalo, so we can expect to see more practical applications for the little pooter that could in the future. µ