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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."
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.
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
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.
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...
The headline is complete sensationalist bullshit. This has absolutely nothing to do with the Raspberry Pi and doesn't compete with it in any appreciable way. Fucking Slashdot.
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...
Many countries still do for broadcast TV, especially SD content. e.g. the UK uses MPEG-2 for its DVB-T SD transmissions. I'm sure it would love to switch to AVC and DVB-T2 but that would instantly obsolete any TV or set top box using the existing format and cause an uproar It means for the moment at least that MPEG-2 is still a necessity. It's also likely that MPEG-LA structures their licences such that there is no reason NOT to include support.
Maybe Slashdot could be held to a higher standard and not copy that kind of crap verbatim. There is at least one other site where I get my tech news that seems to be able to pull this off and they make less money and post more stories to boot.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
You may have heard of it but if not, it's a little thin on summaries but other than that, while not perfect, I'll bet it's a lot like what Slashdot was back in the day.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
It is more comparable to the BeagleBoard from TFS, but Raspberry Pi is more in the news now so it is a reasonable statement.
It is not a reasonable statement at all. The raspi is being sold for 25 dollars which is essentially a throway price and it will run on USB power. Its small size is actually secondary to its appeal. This thing will cost at least 4 times as much for board and CPU and will need an external brick. The fact that people do not see the difference is astounding. Especially considering boards that are close to this have been on store shelves for years and years. Ever heard of Via?
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
My first thought was that this is a NanoITX board for i3/i5... turns out NanoITX is actually a smaller form factor (less surface area).
This does not compete with RPi at all. It's significantly larger, and will be significantly more expensive. Considering that the CPU alone will cost *at least* $100 (current prices for cheapest Socket G1 I can find is actually $160 and that's not even an i3), it's not going to be hitting the $100 price tag that TFS suggests either.
(reference needed: http://www.logicsupply.com/categories/processors )
It is not a reasonable statement at all. The raspi is being sold for 25 dollars which is essentially a throway price and it will run on USB power. Its small size is actually secondary to its appeal. This thing will cost at least 4 times as much for board and CPU and will need an external brick. The fact that people do not see the difference is astounding. Especially considering boards that are close to this have been on store shelves for years and years. Ever heard of Via?
More than 4x as much... cheapest Socket G1/G2 CPU I can find is $160. For the CPU alone. You still have to buy the board, the memory, the hard drive, the case, and the power brick.
This is *not* a competitor.
And yes, you're absolutely right about Via. They're still making C7-based boards for much cheaper. Atom-based board/cpu combos as well are an option, and honestly, a better option since Via C7 is an 8-year old design, and doesn't do 64-bit.
I think my user account dates back to late 1998, though I might have read the site for a while before finally registering. There never really was a Golden Age of Slashdot, when all the stories were relevant, the summaries were factual (and properly edited), and the submissions were timely. It's pretty much always been the same as today, though the summaries sometimes do seem a bit more trollish these days. Of course, that's probably the fault of the submitters.
If you go back and read the journal entries and comments from the early days, you'll see that people had much the same concerns back then that they have today: dupes, poor editing of the submissions, flamebait articles, inaccurate summaries, more dupes, and Jon Katz. It's difficult to state how much Jon Katz was hated and reviled. In fact, now that I have no one to focus my Two Minutes Hate on any more, I do feel a bit empty.
I've followed the news about RPi development and manufacturing, and I've seen NOTHING saying the Model A was scrapped. The Model B was developed and manufactured first, because it's easier to take things out than to wedge them in. The Model A's supplied memory was doubled, as they found it was cheaper to omit components between models, than to use different components between the models.