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Intel Puts a PC Into an SD Card-Sized Casing
New submitter mpicpp points out that Intel has unveiled a PC called Edison, which fits into a casing the size of an SD card.
"Edison is based on Intel’s Quark chip, which it launched last year as its attempt to muscle in on that other flavour-of-the-month market: the so-called Internet of Things. It also reflects the company’s new-found keenness on the 'maker' community. Quark, a 22nm low-power x86 processor with two cores, sits inside Intel’s Arduino-compatible Raspberry Pi-alike Galileo board computer. Edison takes the same chip, connects it to a wee bit of LPDDR2 memory and Flash storage, and plugs in Bluetooth 4.0 Smart — aka LE — and Wi-Fi for broader connectivity."
Okay, kidding. But it does bring up a small question: When can these things get up enough horsepower to allow my laptop more space for battery and disk?
(Also, how much can you cram into it before it overloads on the thermals? I can use LuxRender to destroy a full-blown i7 that way, so it's not like this is just a small CPU problem.)
I guess it's cute and all to make tiny computers, but I'm curious as to when this will translate into something usable on the 'bigger' end, e.g. laptops and servers.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
still trying to find a use case outside the crazy data driven people and the attention starved 20 somethings who want to share everything
OK, I've had my fun now.
(I'm from the old days but my userid doesn't work anymore.)
Yes it can. But the freaking monitor is so small that I can't see anything.
If you want bigger, go with the new Bay Trail Atoms. Intel is scaling up and down the spectrum, from HPC to embedded) These particular devices are not meant for human interfacing or running a UI, but for the Internet of Things(really hate that name) and ubiquitous computing.
Good-bye
Now I can drop my entire computer down the heater vent.
Quark is one core, one thread. Not two cores.
http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/rectium.html
How much are they going to charge for it?
The choice of an SD card seems like a strange form factor. As far as I've seen, they're only useful as storage devices. I guess you could put some cloud interface or image processing in it, but it doesn't look like a good choice for a raspberrypi replacement as it'd be difficult to attach anything to it.
Turns out you can install linux on a transcend wifi SD card.
On a related note: Why am I not surprised that slashdot is months behind on this kind of thing and only report it when it becomes a slashvertisement?
"it launched last year as its attempt to muscle in on that other flavour-of-the-month market: the so-called Internet of Things."
I had to specifically point out to the Wired.com journalist writing about my "Right To Serve" issue that he was putting the phrase "Internet of Things" into my mouth in his first draft article. The "Internet of Things" from what I can tell is the establishment dipping its toes into the wonderous waters of IPv6, but finding a way to do it without allowing the residential user to _profit in any way_ from their "internet of things". Because all profit shall be reserved for the establishment. Or so goes the party line.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/07/google-neutrality/
http://cloudsession.com/dawg/downloads/misc/kag-draft-2k121024.pdf
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/07/google-we-can-ban-servers-on-fiber-without-violating-net-neutrality/
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/google-fiber-continues-awful-isp-tradition-banning-servers
http://crossies.com/pissed.html
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/10/google-fiber-now-explicitly-permits-home-servers/
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/08/01/198327/googles-call-for-open-internet.html
Summary didn't mention it, but it does run Linux, and having access to standard Linux on a device this small is actually a very big deal. We're talking a physical/power profile that's down at high-end Arduino levels but with vastly more powerful software capabilities.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Yes folks, soon you will have computers in EVERYTHING!
Is your coffee cup empty, or nearing empty? The Internet of THINGS will give you a coffee cup with wifi and sensors so you will get a tweet on your smartphone when you are almost finished with your coffee so you can plan to get up and get a new cup!
Is there coffee in the pot? The Internet of THINGS will have wifi and sensors in the coffee pot and let you know when it's time to make more!
Is there coffee in the can? You guessed it! The Internet of THINGS will let you know when you need to buy more coffee!
And this is just ONE (well, three) tiny example of how the Internet of THINGS will make your life easier!
Soon mankind will be freed from all the drudgery of having to look in their coffee cup, of not knowing if they will have to wait several minutes for coffee to brew, or even to have to shake the coffee can to find out if there is enough coffee for another pot.
FREEDOM!
so there will be a point where upgrading ur PC is equivalent to swapping out the SD card or two? probably makes sense to have a separate SD card for GPU.
cool.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
These particular devices are not meant for human interfacing or running a UI, but for the Internet of Things(really hate that name) and ubiquitous computing.
I share your loathing for that name. The fact is, these are intended for ubiquitious governance, where everything from a baby rattle to your keychain is a governance device designed to monitor, track, and someday soon record your every action and movement.
The price at which we'll all be willing to sell out to this level of surveillance and control? The convinience of being able to find our car keys whenever we lose them, and monitor our babies without a baby monitor. Do it for the children, and to protect yourself from terrorists! Welcome to the future, where we are all chattel of the state, and there is no getting away.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
beowulf cluster bla bla bla fucking bla.
We will just call them Isolinear chips by then.
This is as noted above is for embedded used. They also debuted a very small desk top:
"Smallness uber alles: Intel's tiny, Haswell-based NUC desktop reviewed: Diminutive desktop is a workstation, game console, and HTPC all rolled into one." by Andrew Cunningham on Jan 6 2014 at http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/01/smallness-uber-alles-intels-tiny-haswell-based-nuc-desktop-reviewed/.
The dimensions of the case are:
4.6 in. x 4.4 in. x 1.4 in.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
Convince the regular laptop makers to adopt pouch battery cells and you'll find there's already quite a bit more space available for battery. The 18650 type cells currently being used leave quite a bit of space even just inbetween themselves, not to mention all the dead space inside the housing where an 18650 simply cannot fit - but pouch cells would. That's what the thin laptops, tablets, etc. already use.
As for storage.. really? I've got a 2TB HDD, a 500GB SSD and another 160GB mSATA SSD in my laptop. Yes, it's a 17" model, but even if you just take a lowly chromebook you can easily fit 2TB. How much more do you need on active storage before it makes more sense to just plug in an external device?
Did that i7 just have no cooling at all, was overclocked, or did you disable all the safeties somehow? Even the old pentium mobiles would throttle down and eventually just shut down if they got too hot - saving its own life and a world of hurt for the owner.
I want to have a second computer inside my computer to do all the maintenance and shit that I don't want to do. Let the microcomputer be wired in to the PCI-Express bus with a bidirectional link and trusted association to access the files and the hardware sensors... it can do virus scans and monitor things, maybe even repair things if the main system goes down... etc
Full framerates, yes, but only on a 1x1 resolution.
I don't want to wear my computer or put my fridge on line. OTOH, it will be really interesting when tomorrow's geeks are able to play with entire computers on a breadboard the way we played with resistors, transistors, etc. when I was a kid.
I keep picturing a little plastic baggy full of x86-based systems, $4.99/doz at RadioShack if they're still in business...
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Okay, kidding. But it does bring up a small question: When can these things get up enough horsepower to allow my laptop more space for battery and disk?
(Also, how much can you cram into it before it overloads on the thermals? I can use LuxRender to destroy a full-blown i7 that way, so it's not like this is just a small CPU problem.)
I guess it's cute and all to make tiny computers, but I'm curious as to when this will translate into something usable on the 'bigger' end, e.g. laptops and servers.
Maybe if you put it in a Watch you can Overclock it.
I'll get me coat.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
It has enough horsepower today. The Mac Classic got useful work done with a 8 Mhz clock. 400MHz computers from the late 90's were usable then just as well as today. You just need to use software that is designed to use resources efficiently which is more than doable with a stripped down X11 *NIX system.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
There's always someone like you that's gotta whine.
SDXC supports up to 2TB of storage. With Edison, that storage doesn't have to actually be in the card. Any device that can read SDXC cards could transparently access up to 2TB of cloud storage.
These particular devices are not meant for human interfacing or running a UI, but for the Internet of Things(really hate that name) and ubiquitous computing.
GreenArrays chips are meant for ubiquitous computing. Bay Trail is only meant for ubiquitous computing if you have a pretty restricted interpretation of what ubiquitous means.
Ezekiel 23:20
Having a sub-computer separated from the main system could be very useful for when you want to be able to perform operations without some of the data required to perform them being on the host machine. The main example I can think of for that would be password management or encryption, where you don't necessarily want either your password database or your encryption keys on the host computer but you want to be able to easily retrieve passwords or perform encryption.
If you really wanted to, then you could use a trusted connection over the Bluetooth to require a phone to approve/deny encryption operations and/or password requests. That way, a bad app on your computer couldn't steal all your passwords without you knowing.
Of course, this particular computer is not going to be powerful enough to perform encryption/decryption but it is an interesting direction.
The application to normal laptops probably wasnt on their forefront rather than the ability to put stronger computer power in smaller (or new) places.
Which isnt to say its not translatable, but I immediately think of the applications in things such as medical devices, autos, and hand held devices that can better utilize this.
Since when does being a Socialist mean 'someone who has a different opinion than me'?
Your kids are hawt.
But your sister-wives are fat .
You're missing the point.
They finally got the size right.
Next they need to get the price in the under $20 range...
Power consumption low enough that it can be powered off either ambient wifi, solar, heat exchanger... something small...
THEN the revolution will come.
More than loudly it will be for embedded devices and housewares, like coffee pots or lights or wall outlets. Think about that. Think about things around your house and then imagine if they were connected.
SD sockets are also readily available for this factor and mechanically robust. Handy if one, say, wanted to build a Beowu.. nevermind.
..don't panic
Did that i7 just have no cooling at all, was overclocked, or did you disable all the safeties somehow? Even the old pentium mobiles would throttle down and eventually just shut down if they got too hot - saving its own life and a world of hurt for the owner.
It was a Samsung RC-512... it had c(sorta adequate) cooling and SpeedStep enabled, and no overclocking, but over time (around 8 months) I was forced to set processor affinity for the high-end render apps down to just half the cores, lest it just kick out and shut down the laptop.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Think about things around your house and then imagine if they were connected.
I did - in 1999, when Sun was pushing their Jini framework up at the University of Utah. They even had this cute little video of what an Internet-connected house looked and acted like.
I got to ask the first question in their Q&A session. I asked them how the setup would prevent me from, say, breaking into their home network, locking their freezer defrost on permanently, keep the doors permanently unlocked in spite of saying they're locked, lock their televisions on 24/7 and to only porn channels, turn on the A/C full-blast during wintertime (or the heater during summer) - oh, or make all the bedroom lights come on and off randomly at 1-2 minute intervals throughout the night.
They mumbled something about "we're working on security" and gave me a mug. Every question after that from everyone else only got worse from there.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
but will it be televised?
True dat.
Got rid of my last Pentium III laptop last month, gave it to a woman who wanted her 4 year old kid to leave mommy's laptop alone :) It was my knocking-around-in-the-truck-don't-care-if-it-gets-stolen machine. Debian ran great on it, and as far as I know it still does.
The rest of my machines are various Pentium 4 and Pentium M boxes with the exception of a recently acquired dual-core laptop. Linux runs great on them, too. Only problem I have is USB, they don't have 2.0 onboard so I use cards.
Well considering its using the Quark chip which if its the same as on their Galileo board (seriously TFA is so light on details it might as well read "Hey we made a thing") then we are talking about a 400Mhz Pentium I here friend. With a chip THAT weak you simply aren't gonna be doing much with the thing....heck other than small embedded jobs I can't even think right off hand of any good jobs for a chip as weak as a P I. I was gonna say MP3 player but then realized most folks expect to be able to play video on their PMPs so that's out...hell I got nothing. What good is a 400Mhz Pentium I when for the same amount of juice you could have an ARM chip that would be able to do more work per watt?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
What's intriguing is that the situation has not changed much actually.
Many Internet of Everything advocates seem to focus on allowing chips with tiny RAM and microscopic resources.
So they can't do cryptography and it seems the topic is not really mentioned.
Which is a shame.
The same thing happened for NFC tags and the resulting system is so insecure that it's disabled by default in Android, not enabled when the phone is locked anyway.
That's kind of odd when you think that Smart cards have had the features for a while and it's just a matter of replacing connectors+WAN by radio+WAN...
I do a lot more stuff on my computer today that software from 15-20 years ago is incapable of doing at all.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Where I work, we still have some 800Mhz machines running XP that are used for a web-based time-in/out system. They fulfill that purpose just fine. It's been my experience that old machines are quite useful until you install antivirus on them.
EVEN BETTER: imagine if every last douchebag Facebook cunt like you fucked off and stayed in your own trendy little Facebook cesspool, wanking to each other's day to day minutia, keeping the marketers happy and fat, and fucking left Slashdot alone.
At least he isn't posting as AC, you coward. BTW Slashdot is owned by dice holdings, a provider of job advertisement websites, so your attempt at sounding alternative hasn't worked.
Just kidding AC, please feel free to join in anytime you like!
My sig has no nature
Rather than just calling someone an idiot, here's some actual useful information to provide a real rebuttal to that point:
http://www.steegle.com/google-devices/chromebooks/faq#TOC-What-storage-options-do-Chromebooks-provide-
Local Storage Options
Chromebooks provide a limited amount of internal storage: the amount of storage available depends on the model of Chromebook you own and start at 16GB and rise to 300GB of internal, local storage. All Chromebooks provide an SD card slot so you can extend storage using SD memory cards.
Come on, even an Arduino Uno has an MSRP above $20.
Intel priced their Galileo at $70 to compete with Arduino, RasPi, Teensy, BeagleBone, etc, almost all of which are less than $50. I expect Intel to price Edison even higher. If Intel really wants to be a player in the Maker segment, they've got to get serious about the price points.
NSA will destroy those jobs...
Hey, it's all good. Once we've got fridges hooked up, coke cans and bottles, Lunchables, and every other food related item and cigarette packs, alcohol bottles, beer mugs, and so forth we can pass a law where they will integrate with our shiny Obamacare system so that your insurance can be adjusted according to what you eat! Perhaps all of our lives little details will become mandatorily given to the government for our own good - you been getting around a sleeping with some honeys (I know, this is Slashdot, but we can all have a dream!) , the government must know because it increases your risk of an STD which increases your risk profile, own a gun? that'll be hooked into the government information pool too. Own a gun? Watch too much TV? Play too many video games? Don't watch enough government sanctioned TV? Everything can be used to enhance your profile of insurance risk, terrorism risk, etc.
The third party doctrine will accommodate any invasion of privacy since, under current law, once information about you becomes available to a third party, the government can compel it's production without a warrant. Once everything you own is hooked up to the Net, it all becomes fair game for government analysis. Of course, once these functions become ubiquitous opting out will become impossible but the courts will continue to waive their collective hands and say that we willingly sent our private information to a third party so it's fair game for the government.
but will it be televised?
It will be televised, but no one will watch it live. They will DVR it so they can skip the commercials.
- Mike
I've often wondered why they haven't gone to square / rectangular cells. (if they don't like li-poly bags). They do exist (most cellphones with a metal can instead of a bag are / were li-ion).
Even square-ish 18650s should add some capacity (+25% volume, how effectively it can be used I'm unsure), and take little volume that isn't being wasted already.
Sent from my PDP-11
Per chip costs for embedded platforms are normally pretty cheap. As a hobyist, excluding labor, the most expensive part is board cost. Nevertheless, things like power regulators and transistors tend to add up to more than the processor. I would kill (not really NSA people) for a cheap SOC witch could drive 100mA per GPIO pin. It would certainly make working with LEDs easier.
If you look at most things like the Arduino the component cost is minuscule compared to labor and payback for R&D. Which still leaves decent room for profit. Just look at how cheap the Arduino clones are.
So lets pretend that we've just completed writing this code, as opposed to having just completed sabotaging it -Altera
See: http://haxit.blogspot.ch/2013/08/hacking-transcend-wifi-sd-cards.html
32 MB RAM, ~400 MHz 32-bit ARM, several gigabytes of flash storage, about $50 at Amazon.com.
The most common term is prismatic cell.
Prismatic Li-ion were used in some high capacity laptop batteries in the late 90s/early 00s but seems to have fallen out of favor.
Not quite sure why, likely worse capacity/weight compared to cylindrical and lack of economy of scale were big factors.
ackthpt made me chuckle. Your comment made me feel sorry for people who seem to derive pleasure out of putting people down (though by writing this am I now in that category?).
Is it even a P1? ... looks like a 486 with twice the L1 cache.
Intel calls it "Pentium class", but looking at the core architecture (Quark Core Hardware Reference Manual, chapter 3)
so there will be a point where upgrading ur PC is equivalent to swapping out the SD card or two?
The hell with that, imagine a Beowulf cluster of these things!
Does anyone know where I can get 24mm rackmount kits?
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
I got an Uno clone on eBay for less than $10.
The cloud storage provider would have to "transparently" present it as an exFAT file system in order for SDXC devices to recognize it. File-level protocols don't directly map onto what an SD host (other than an SDIO host) expects. It'd also have to somehow interact with OS-side caching that doesn't expect files to change behind the host's back as long as the card isn't ejected.
How about Wiced?
Well a 486 with a larger cache pretty much WAS the Pentium I dude. Folks don't seem to realize how far we've come, you try doing anything on a PI or PII today and see how fricking painful the kinds of tasks we take for granted are...hell I have a 400MHz PII I got handed to me that is gonna end up in the dumpster just because I can't even find a useful job for the thing.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The Pentium was superscaler, the Pentium Pro and Pentium II added out of order execution and were based on microcode internals with a translation frontend which is very, very different from the 486.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Exactly. I can get a FreeScale FRDM-KL25Z for $13. For many in the hacker community, this is plenty. These other guys need to work on the pricing a little.
Just use Microsoft Security Essentials, and there won't be any significant performance hit.
but over time (around 8 months) I was forced to set processor affinity for the high-end render apps down to just half the cores, lest it just kick out and shut down the laptop.
Sounds like your heat sink got a bit dusty and the CPU was overheating.
Nothing that can't be fixed with a can of compressed air (or even a few good blows into the intake/exhaust vents).
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I don't have to worry, I just prepare and cook those dishes they deliver to my door/store, serisouly it's solved, AFAI can see the automatic grocery list is a long way off. We eat better and spend a lot less time on dealing with food, at least 2 hours less per week,
Things in my kitchen order by importance:
1. fridge
2. stove
3. food delivered to my apartment/store, with 4 meals.
4. running water
Sound ok to me.
x11 efficient? sorry but after using an amiga which ran workbench in 128k of ram and had full plug and play within the OS, getting X11 running in under 8MB of ram was a total pain in the arse, and had inferior functionality (other than remote display, which was not useful to me at the time).
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Won't really block a lot of malware either. We run forefront here (the commercial version of it) and its pretty shit.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I used to play quake on a Pentium 90. also ran photoshop. did software development, web development, etc. a lot of that stuff I also did on slower machines before that. 400mhz is heaps.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Here, pretty block diagrams:
486DX2
Pentium
Quark
Spot the similarities and differences.
I have the suspicion we're basically agreeing on how "fast" Quark is. As in "a RPi runs circles around it".
Has that page been intentionally left blank?
An SD card today has a ~100MHz ARM or 8051 running the flash translation layer and wear levelling algorithms. See http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=3592 for some insight.
AmigaOS was also ludicrously unstable and insecure because of the lack of protected memory.
What is cheap to you? I would have thought the Imp ($25, incs WiFi) and Beetle ($7-8, no Wifi) would output 100mA per GPIO pin.
I keep hearing people saying how old stuff work well blah blah. Yes they do work, but they don't work well.
It's only fine because many people are so used to misery that they forget what things could be and lose hope of future.
A desktop system without smooth font-aliasing optimized for screens hurts eyes.
A browser without multi-tabbed UI, middle-click, or auto-restore previous tabs, hurts productivity seriously.
A PC that takes more than 10 seconds to boot into desktop with all common apps open is a waste of my time and it drives me nuts, even though I might have nothing better to do.
Bottom line is a system which looks like 5-years-old system sucks.
Everything should get better everyday.
I'm sure you could find some here.
Finaly we can create our own synch service on private server and make the SD card uppload data directly to us.
No more paying for cloud service and loosing control of who has access to your private photos!
I bet they will claim you infringe some patent if you implement that though...
And comparing the three it appears I'm right, its more like the 486 or first gen Pentium than the later Pentium Pro/Pentium II design.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The truth tastes like sick.
Not quite.
The Pentium had dual integer pipes (with some limitations), and a fully-pipelined FPU unit with full hardware support for FP add/mult/div. Double the bus width (to help feed the thirsty FPU and dual int pipes). Branch prediction (4 state). Really, the larger, better-architected cache were on the low-order of importance.
The 486 had just one fully-pipelined integer unit, and a limited NON-PIPLEINED FPU. The FPU hardware was cut-down compared to the 80387 it replaced (due to limitations imposed by the desired die size). This was more than made up for by the removal of the communication overhead between the two chips (15+ cycles on 386/387), and higher clock speeds. So overall performance increased over the 80387, but it was absolutely DESTROYED by the Pentium FPU.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Can we call it a nanocomputer?
... one step closer to ORAC
So overall performance increased over the 80387, but it was absolutely DESTROYED by the Pentium FPU.
So were your spreadsheets.......
What is cheap to you? I would have thought the Imp ($25, incs WiFi) and Beetle ($7-8, no Wifi) would output 100mA per GPIO pin.
You would have thought wrong: the imp module maxes out at 20 mA on its LED pins. I couldn't find an output current spec for the Beetle, but it claims to be a mini Arduino Leonardo, so I wouldn't expect more than the Leonardo's 40 mA per pin.
"What is cheap" is a good question--for those who can live with two chips (the horror!), a $6 TLC5940 will get you 16 channels that drive 120 mA each (just the first chip I found).
True, but that was a limitation of the original hardware as much as anything else, as it had no MMU. As it was never designed to be multi-user, and networking was an afterthought, security wasn't anywhere near as much of a problem for its intended usage (single user, offline).
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
The problem with the "I ran X back in the day" argument is thus friend...you were running BARE METAL. You really were. Oh you may have THOUGHT you were running an OS but the entire underpinning of Win9X was DOS and so other than some basic I/O when you launched that Quake you may as well have been launching it from CLI for as little as the OS was actually doing.
So sure if that version of Quake was never gonna get on the net, in fact as long as the entire system was firewalled off the net? Then yeah you could play a few old games. But a modern OS has to do a hell of a lot more and comparing the two really isn't fair.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Yeah I want your fridge online too!
That way I can do that to you every fucking day by messing with the temperature settings, and I'll only do it because you're dumb enough to put your fridge online :)
Sure, but how much of that isn't porn related?
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.