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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."
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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!