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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?
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.
I think there is a world market for maybe five wearable computers
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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!
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
Agreed. Technology progresses quickly. Society not so fast. In some ways this is good, but it does create face-palm moments.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's the new clock! remember when everything was made 'new' by slapping a digital clock on it?
'round we go again.
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?
OMG, such an effort to wait the 15 minutes to preheat an oven. and how much are you going to pay in utility costs to have your oven on while you're commuting home? and how hard is it to notice that you only have say 2 eggs left.
It's more than that, and it's silly little things we haven't thought about. Granted, we can do some of this already, but I had a use case this last week. I have a really hard time getting up in the morning when it's dark out. They make sunrise alarm clocks, but I think it would be nice to have the bedroom lights slowly dim up to simulate a sunrise and gently wake me up. (This is possible with current home automation tech)
It might be nice to have a light sensor in my gutters that warns me if a downspout is clogged or they need cleaning before my annual fall cleanup. I have a whole house humidifier and when it gets to -10 like this week, it needs to be turned down or I get condensation on the windows. Smart things can do that for me. These are all things that ubiquitous computing can do, and that's pretty cool.
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?
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.
OMG, such an effort to wait the 15 minutes to preheat an oven. and how much are you going to pay in utility costs to have your oven on while you're commuting home? and how hard is it to notice that you only have say 2 eggs left.
I propose the following term for those who really want this: mental obesity.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
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.
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.
Are you suggesting that it costs less to have your empty oven preheating with your presence than it is without your presence? Odd.
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.
so what would i do with a computer in my fridge, toaster, oven, AC, on my clothing, etc? all wired into the internet and open to hacking?
i still need to put the toast into the toaster to actually make the toast, although i'm sure some technofiends will put the toast in, walk away and use an app via wifi to start the toasting process
Your fridge likely already has a computer in it. "What does more computing power for appliances give us?" is the proper question. You can think of a lot of the mundane day to day things and figure that more computing power will make a lot of it work better, while it might be completely useless for other things.
Fridge - Precise digital control of overall temperature, and zone controls for individual areas with specialty products (for instance, bins with meat can be kept colder than bins with veggies/fruit). Potentially better power consumption and less food spoilage.
AC/Heating - Active monitoring determines which rooms are occupied and only heats and cools those areas. Long-term analysis predicts which areas of the house are likely or unlikely to be occupied at any given time and reduces energy use in those areas automatically. Again, some energy savings potential here. Monitors that detect someone's presence in a room can double as a security and home monitoring system.
Oven - I'd imagine it would be useful if the oven could automatically send you a quick notification when it's finished baking or cooking something in case you don't hear the timer ding. Fewer accidentally burnt meals. Same with a toaster. Also, improved computing power means the oven probably knows to shut itself off even if you forget to.
Clothes - I'd imagine a lot of parents would love to be able to embed small emergency tracking devices in their young children's clothes so they can quickly check up on where they are at any time without relying on an easily lost external device. Or a teenager might wish to wear a hidden cell phone in her jacket for her own protection.
Honestly, it's not all that hard to think of useful scenarios where embedded computing could improve many devices. Sure, there are plenty of things that don't need a computer in them, but it's silly to reject the possibility of improving these devices out of hand.
Still, the issue you bring up with security is very valid. We're hearing about instances of people being subjected to spying via their own hacked webcams, so we need to think about security-related issues very seriously before tossing them into situations where people's privacy can be easily violated. For instance, any sort of house monitor could easily be turned against the homeowner if the security is breached.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
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.
Something like this is already implemented on HP's PA-RISC and (later Itanium) servers since last century. Go onto the system console, type Ctrl+B and you have access to a small computer completely separate from the main OS and CPU, running diagnostic software which has "probes" on all the hardware buses and components. On the newer servers you can use-it to power on and off various parts of the server, and to enable or disable various busses and connections, allowing you to electrically partition a single server in multiple ones (CPU board 0 + I/O board 0 = 1st server, CPU board 1 + I/O board 1 = 2nd one ...) power them on and access their consoles. Like some kind of VMWare implemented in hardware.
1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
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
Instead of having computers in everything, I'd rather have robot that checked the milk and all that. What we're really all hankering for are slaves^H^H^H^H^H^H robots shaped like human beings, that we don't have to feel sorry about exploiting. They'll do all the things we don't want to do and won't require everything in the house to have a battery in it. I'd much rather deal with a single robot than worry that every appliance in my home has a brain and its own agenda.
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."
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.
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.
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!
As opposed to "slowly" with AMD, right?
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I'm sure you could find some here.