What do you get when you put a 1GHz ARM Cortex-A8 processor into the Linux[] community? We’ll find out right now with the BeagleBoard-xM, the latest upgrade in Digi-Key’s popular open hardware/software kit.

By now you’ve seen the BeagleBoard story, and today’s upgrade to the platform brings several things of note. First is the brand new TI Sitara DM3730 processor running at 1GHz, enabling everything to run faster. Second is the 512MB onboard memory, which TI’s Jason Kridner says enables many applications to be built in place, self hosted on the BeagleBoard-xM. Jason also points out there’s no non-volatile memory on the board – it’s brick-proof, everything needed to configure the board is done from the microSD slot. The other main and very welcome change is the integration of 10/100 Ethernet and more USB ports – no more dongles.

I was teasing Jason that there’ll be a broad range of support in about 10 minutes, as soon as the community gets their hands on this. It’s code compatible processor should make life easy, and a range of new features should really get developers going. $179 to get going and a wide range of open-source projects already in the community, plus more dogpower and better usability, should be of immediate interest.