The inside scoop on the Pro X2!

Years ago while working on our senior project at Carnegie Mellon University, Berend and I struggled to debug our VLIW processor design in time for the big demo the next day. Neither of us had slept much in the last few days and the group was frustrated trying to overcome yet another hurdle on dwindling mental faculties. Berend took the opportunity to poke me with a soldering iron. The exact temperature of that soldering iron is still debated to this day, but I took the opportunity to feign a mortal wound and to run away to get a few hours sleep before I fell over. Berend stayed behind, solved the problem at hand, but suffered hallucinations on the way home. I returned, tied up the loose ends, and proudly demonstrated the winning design.

Many years later it would take more than just a lack of sleep, the threat of hot iron, or hallucinations to develop the Pro X2 product. Although the original family of Eye-Fi products packed extraordinary functionality and features into an SD card, there were limits to the performance and features that we could continue to add to the original design. We wanted a new card that would address all of our customers’ wish list items: the fastest read/write performance speed classification, the newest 802.11n radio technology, and an engine that could make our existing features faster and enable us to develop exciting new functionality that we had to previously write off as impossible. The Pro X2 is the fruit of that development effort combined with an abundance of our amazing engineering team’s time, passion and talent.

The core of the Pro X2 is the X2 engine (code-name:Arcturus, brownie points for catching the widly-popular syndicated animated series reference). For those interested in computer architecture, Arcturus is a custom chip based on a 200 MHz ARM926 processor with an MMU, dedicated flash and radio interface engines, and encryption acceleration hardware. Translated into non-engineering terms that means that the Pro X2 contains by far the most powerful SD flash controller available.

The X2 card software has been extensively improved to take advantage of these features. We’ve incorporated virtual memory code paging and memory protection, zero-copy network stacks, and fault containment. The software takes advantage of being highly-integrated with the SD controller to deliver innovative (and unusual) features like “Endless Memory”.

The X2 radio moves Eye-Fi into the realm of 802.11n Wi-Fi radios. The 802.11n 1×1 radio enables increased throughput and range. For geotagging, the improved radio increases the ability of the Eye-Fi card to incorporate weak signals into the Wi-Fi positioning results.

What that means for our customers is that everything an Eye-Fi card used to do, the Pro X2 will do it better and faster. Highly anticipated new features like Endless Memory made possible by X2 will be available immediately.

We’re delighted to bring a new level of performance and flexibility to the Eye-Fi product line with the promise of many exciting new things to come.  We just need a night or two to catch up on our sleep.”