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Intel Unveils Tiny Next Unit of Computing To Match Raspberry Pi
MrSeb writes "Details of a new, ultra-compact computer form factor from Intel, called the Next Unit of Computing (NUC) are starting to emerge. First demonstrated at PAX East at the beginning of April, and Intel's Platinum Summit in London last week, NUC is a complete 10x10cm (4x4in) Sandy Bridge Core i3/i5 computer. On the back, there are Thunderbolt, HDMI, and USB 3.0 ports. On the motherboard itself, there are two SO-DIMM (laptop) memory slots and two mini PCIe headers. On the flip side of the motherboard is a CPU socket that takes most mobile Core i3 and i5 processors, and a heatsink and fan assembly. Price-wise, it's unlikely that the NUC will approach the $25 Raspberry Pi, but an Intel employee has said that the price will 'not be in the hundreds and thousands range.' A price point around $100 would be reasonable, and would make the NUC an ideal HTPC or learning/educational PC. The NUC is scheduled to be released in the second half of 2012."
Sounds like this has a lot of IO and expandability options. It could fill a niche not fully served by RPi.
A design that, sans CPU, optimistically would cost 4 times as much as raspberry pi? CPUs that by themselves notably cost at least $250 right now?
To get to the Raspberry pi functionality, looking at $350 investment. That's more than an order of magnitude more expensive. I know the solution will be more powerful than raspberry pi, but the nearly all the excitement around raspberry pi revolves around price point.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
that embedded computing is not about HDMI and USB ports. Give me serial peripherals, I2C, Ethernet, and all this in a *single* system-on-chip, so I don't have to add support chips around the core.
It's far more powerful, probably consumes far more as well, and has no I/O pins, which is kind of the point in cheap SOACs like Raspberry Pi. Oh, and it won't be "lock up your daughters" cheap either. If anything, for spec and output, it sounds like a competitor in the Mac Mini ballpark.
Nobody will be able to find the memory ports because they're SO-DIMM.
At least *this* one will be useful for multimedia purposes (satellite, DVD, etc). The lack of MPEG2 makes the Raspberry Pi worthless for a good solid real-time flexible media centre. Having those PCI ports will also mean hooking up other important multimedia things that are missing on the Raspberry Pi, such as SPDIF, and who knows, maybe even VGA. x86 compatibility is just the icing on the cake.
I doubt the guts of my laptop are much bigger than that once you tear out the scree, keyboard, DVD drive, superfluous external ports.
they are on the port-side.
120 characters ought to be enough for anyone
Intel goes and finishes the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classmate_PC. Before starting a new project?
Yo Dog, I herd you like mac minis, so I spent the past seven years hitting a mini with the ugly stick and then released it as some sort of revolutionary device... Seriously.
Just for giggles, I then compared it to an entirely different device based around a smartphone processor and in an entirely different price bracket. This makes total sense, just trust me.
Now, purely in itself, a standardized teeny-ATX motherboard would be nice(especially if we'll someday be able to get mini-PCIe cards that aren't NICs in any quantity... If Intel is planning one, that seems like a good thing all around: the world is already cluttered with various proprietary teeny-motherboard things, and it'd be nice to have a bit of unification in that area.
However, I'm just not seeing the novelty here: The x86/embedded/industrial market has been rotten with teeny motherboards for almost as long as there has been an embedded x86 market, most laptops are built around small x86 motherboards by necessity, and some comparatively niche players, along with Apple, have released desktop products of not dissimilar size already. Historically, they've been fairly expensive, since minaturization isn't free, and Intel has no reason to cut margins on their silicon if they can avoid it. If Chipzilla has decided to drop the hammer and specify where teeny motherboards Shall put their screw holes, great; but that would be about the only new aspect of all this...
Who says this is supposed to be competition for the Raspberry Pi at all? Intel is trying to integrate as much as possible into their native chips. A shrink in form factor for lightweight PCs completely makes sense in that line.
IMHO, the goal should be to make a ubiquitous embedded platform for building appliances. To that end, the device needs to be low power so that it could run on batteries. It also need to run a real OS e.g. Linux but the catch here is that it needs to completely boot in a few seconds at most especially if it's faceless. Products from Technologic Systems make great strides towards this but their sub-2-second boot times are to Busybox and don't include USB initialization. USB adds another 4 seconds to the boot time. Six seconds is reasonable for a faceless system but anything longer than that and the user will wonder if it's working or not. Booting to Debian takes way too long. Beyond this, such systems need to be tolerant of power loss. Running off batteries means a real power switch. Any file system that takes minutes to check after a power loss is out.
Make it so.
You can already get an Atom-powered mini-ITX for only 70$USD.
The crazy thing is that you could probably fit two of these new NUC boards into the case of an old C64, along with a power supply and a hard drive.
I'm betting Slashdot editors ordered a Raspberry Pi and still haven't received it. It consumes 95% of their thoughts and that's why they keep mentioning it everywhere.
If the price is on par with raspberry or just above it this is going to be awesome. 293479x times the power.
Not happening, unfortunately. At retail(newegg.com used, prices for CPUs tend to be pretty similar across the board at a given time) the cheapest LGA1155 CPU is ~$40. 1.6GHz, single core, desktop binned part(unfortunately, low-end mobile CPUs don't seem to be as available in the retail channel, so I couldn't find a number for something in the mobile TDP range). At least it comes with a fan. Now, even such a puny device will brutalize a 700mhz ARM SoC designed to run from whatever battery is slim enough to fit in a contemporary cellphone; but if the CPU alone costs $5 more than the entire rpi, CPU+motherboard is going to run at least double, and RAM and boot volume still haven't been taken care of.
An overwhelmingly more powerful platform, certainly, as one would expect in a PC vs. basically-a-cellphone matchup; but the price delta is about what one would expect as well...
So, a motherboard with no RAM and no CPU, in the $100 range, I can see. But with Thunderbolt, too? I know the Thunderbolt cables are a bit pricey because of the chips built into those, but are the Thunderbolt controller chips *that* much cheaper than the cable chips?
Ethernet would also be nice too
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
This sounds great. If they can get it to low enough price and don't intentionally cripple it to avoid it eating into their more mainstream product sales, it will be ideal for low power servers, car computers, etc.
BUT... it's not in the same league as the Raspberry Pi, not on price and not on application.
A NUC, with CPU, GPU, RAM, etc, (and presumably a profit margin?) is never going to be in same price range as the Raspberry Pi. It may not be in the 'hundreds and thousands range' (note the plural on hundreds) but I can't see this happening for $100 either. Maybe closer to $180 to start with. That alone puts it in a different league than the $30 Raspberry Pi, especially when it comes to education and the potential for it to be damaged. The raspberry Pi is almost disposable compared to this, making it ideal for use by children, for experimentation and hobbies.
And with regards to power consumption, a Raspberry Pi uses what, 2-3 Watts? The NUC, even with a low power mobile processor is never going to match this. Super low power consumption makes the Raspberry Pi useable for applications like small robotics, mobile or external projects where the only power source may be battery, solar, etc. You can run the Raspberry Pi off AA batteries for a decent amount of time.
Also, the fact this requires a fan means it will probably be broken within weeks, if not hours, once placed in hands of experimenting children unless they're simply used as traditional computer devices, in which case there's not much point in using this over a normal PC. The Raspberry Pi's are meant to be tinkered with, have pins for daughter boards that children can make themselves, etc. I can't see many school children making use of the NUC's PCIe expansion ports so easily and affordably!
I think the price point alone kind of rules this out from being widely used in education. Schools may be able to afford one or two per class if they're lucky, but what's the point? They most likely have at least that number of x86 PCs sitting idle in the same room? At least with Raspberry Pi you can have children working in pairs, with a device for each pair, or maybe over time, one each. And if they break it, it's not exactly the end of the world.
If the price is on par with raspberry
Um, it isn't. The board will cost more than a Pi. Then there's the CPU. Oh, and the RAM. And there's no SD card slot so it has no storage without buying an add-on.
No sig today...
The total cost for one of these systems is going to be more than a cheap Netbook. At least with a Netbook I have storage to put an OS, lots of ports, Wifi built in, and much more. I've converted my old Acer Netbook into the playrooms HTPC, and it's small enough that it takes up very little space.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
Hey, parallel has a lot of good uses.
VGA = that shit died a decade ago.
No it didn't at least not at the cheap end of the market, most new monitors now have DVI but I see plenty of older ones (both CRT and LCD) that only have VGA and are still perfectly servicable.
Or do you also want your DB9 serial, DB25 parallel and PS/2 ports back?
my latest motherboard (gigabyte Z68AP-D3) has one each of those ports and I wasn't even specifically looking for any of them when I bought it. It doesn't have VGA but there are other motherboards in the same price range that do (I don't use the onboard graphics so I didn't care what interface it had).
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
It's 4x more expensive and runs Windows. Doesn't sound like competition to me...
It looks just like an AppleTV, but expandable. If they can figure out a cheap way to get a processor and memory on board, it would be an ideal platform for all the XBMC tinkerers out there.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
FTFA: "The use of the word “unit” is particularly interesting — it suggests that the NUC might be stackable, in much the same way as my imaginary.."
The fan location suggests otherwise. Stack them and they will be drawing heat from their brethren.
The NeXT Computing Unit is the amount of computing power in a stock NeXT Computer.
Even the newest tiny Intel box will be more than one NCU.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
First of all, from the summary:
A price point around $100 would be reasonable, and would make the NUC an ideal HTPC or learning/educational PC.
Guess what? Pretty much any cheap computer picked from eBay makes for a great learning/educational PC! What Intel is creating here is a full high-performance general-use computer, not some simple board for embedded projects. A way better comparison could be found from the Nano-ITX and Pico-ITX form factors, which for some reason never really took off (not many products). If you can educate me, why is that, I'd be appreciated. Maybe Mini-ITX was "small enough"?
There are lots of embeddable PCs available now. Most of them are in the $100 upwards price range provided you buy enough of them. This puppy doesn't sound much different from what's already available. Though if it's power requirements are so high that it needs a fan, I have to think it's rather missed the point of embeddable or single board computers meant to be part of a larger device.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
With fan noise, no chance of being admitted to the average living room ("Wife Acceptance Factor"). ;-)
Even if you claim to have found the rare bird known as geek girl...
There are also eoma68 cards in the works using the AMD Fusion APU's that will only use open source firmware so you won't have to settle for EFI or a closed BIOS as you have to with Intel.
1ghz Dual-Core CPU with AMD Radeon HD 6250 GPU,
http://rhombus-tech.net./amd_g_series/
AMD APUs for Notebooks, Netbooks & Tablets
http://www.amd.com/US/PRODUCTS/NOTEBOOK/APU/Pages/tablet.aspx#3
AMD Embedded G-Series Platform
http://www.amd.com/us/products/embedded/processors/Pages/g-series.aspx
http://www.amd.com/us/Documents/49282_G-Series_platform_brief.pdf
Quidquid latine dictum sit altum viditur
you won't have to settle for EFI or a closed BIOS as you have to with Intel.
I don't get the practical benefit of coreboot over EFI/BIOS.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
So is Intel trying to blow some new life into PC104 standard? StackableUSB is much nicer...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
"Nuc Nuc nuc!!!" Woob woob woob! Nyahhhhhhhh yah yahhhh..."
The PS/2 port only has one use; but it is Good.
IBM Model M.
Stupid comparison. Must be a stupid article, I won't bother reading, as obviously they don't know what they are talking about.
Small form factor is not new. ITX (Mini, Nano, Pico) have been around for years and years.
Raspberry Pi is a totally integrated 25$ ultra low power computer not a lot bigger than a thumb drive.
Intel has something that is modular, is 4" by 4" square, will cost over 100$, and not include a CPU, Memory, Etc... and will need a significant power supply.
Used core2duo mobile cpu's on ebay go for over 40 bucks. I just bought a t7200 intel for 38.50 shipped to upgrade a mac mini. I can't image a mobile i3 for less than 100 dollars.
Part of me wants to say "Nicely done, when can I buy one", but part of me says "...and this differs from the packaging jobs done by premium laptop manufacturers like Apple and Sony how? They've been making custom funky-shaped motherboards with this amount of acreage for a while now."
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
The point is you almost always HAVE the monitor already. I dont know about you, but most people I have hae a TV which has multiple HDMI ports.
Why would your embedded project need it's own monitor?
Commercial BIOS isn't free, not even as in beer.
From what I read, the smartest thing to do would be to layer UEFI on top of Coreboot. This would give you compatibility with platforms already out in the wild while still having an open BIOS.
This device is a thin client for use in places like retail store look-up and POS terminals. Think Lowe's, Home Depot, LensCrafters, PEP Boys, AutoZone, WalMart, Costco, &etc. People forget how big a market retail IT is.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
with more beef, which means large heatsink and heavier power requirements, is that what I am seeing?
I live in a non-firstworld country.
USD 25 is something I could have payed for the Raspberry PI with a slight effort. USD 100 is just way too much, being almost a week's worth of food, and something really out-of-budget.
I think this is the market intel forgot about, and there the PI will still dominate.
Seems like a possible board for a dense cluster however the memory options may kill that. I'd love to see something like this but with a large RAM capacity.... then watch how many people use these in clusters.
Ouch. I knew that the really high-end mobile stuff was damn pricey(and that seems to be the only stuff that is sold new without a computer wrapped around it, since people who buy bare CPUs generally want an upgrade); but I didn't know that the low end was so high as well.
I suspect that, if it came to it, Intel's superior fab capabilities would allow them to release a socket-compatible(or, if they are feeling really mean, slightly different socket that allows you to drop a 'real' i3/i5/i7 in; but doesn't allow you to drop a CPU released for the new socket into a normal i3/5/7 socket device...) 'i3 crippled edition' with various desirable features lasered off; but enough punch remaining to outfight the ARM team for substantially less than a normal i3.
They certainly Would Not Appreciate the margin cut, and would probably resort to all sorts of shenanigans, technical or contractual, to try to ensure that such a part didn't cannibalize sales of their nicer processors(in the same way that Atom parts were restricted exclusively to laptops with teeny screens and not much RAM, and were engineered to have lousy PCIe bandwidth to keep them from being paired with decent GPUs); but they could do it if they didn't have any other choice... They'd still have trouble touching the price of an ARM SoC with anything larger than one of their Atom parts; but the i3 and friends are genuinely much more powerful.
I don't really know who the Intel device is marketed too so I can only really continue with the Raspberry Pi comparison. The Raspberry Pi is marketed as an inexpensive computer with some embedded controller like capabilities (ie all the GPIOs) for getting kids into programming. It's not about making a really smart kegerator and the like. So, yes, most of the kids probably have a tv in their living room that has HDMI. So what? Is that where the kid is going to spend his/her time? I'm sure the parents will just love that! They didn't have anything else to use that tv for did they?
OTOH VGA unused VGA devices are lying around EVERYWHERE