Intel Planning Thumb-Sized PCs For Next Year

angry tapir (1463043) writes Intel is shrinking PCs to thumb-sized "compute sticks" that will be out next year. The stick will plug into the back of a smart TV or monitor "and bring intelligence to that," said Kirk Skaugen, senior vice president and general manager of the PC Client Group at Intel, during the Intel investor conference in Santa Clara, California. They might be a bit late to the party, but since Skaugen mentioned both Chromecast and Amazon's Fire TV Stick, hopefully that means Intel has some more interesting and general-purpose plans.

Comments

Probably not the same thing at all...

[jedidiah]

Chromecast and the Roku thumb sized machines are very specialized hardware that likely won't have the capabilities or flexibility of an Intel variant. They likely not to be in the same class at all.

If anything, they might be comparable to some generic Android stick and possibly not even that due to the limitations of Android.

This might be more like a Chromebox.

Been there, done that

[Stormwatch]

So, just like any of the countless ARM-based Android mini-PCs that are already out there right now. Except this is quite more expensive.

Re:If it can transcode high bitrate/any file type

[ihtoit]

well, then yu'll be after a general purpose, platform agnostic appliance. Which, according to the summary, is what Intel are planning.
Keep watching this story, you might be pleasantly surprised. I know I am. RasPi is great an' all, but I'm not a programmer, I'm not in it for the imagineering aspect of computing a la ZX81 Program-It-Yourself, I'm at that stage in my life where I want shit to just work. Hell, I have the same build image on my Win7 laptop I built in 2005 (updated for latest/last versions, obviously). I'm too old to be taught new tricks.