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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.
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.
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.
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?
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'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.