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.

Re:Probably not the same thing at all...

[hairyfeet]

It won't matter as THEY ARE ALL DOOMED, at least in the USA...why? Because they ALL require plentiful bandwidth to the cloud and the ISPs are going with ever nastier data caps.

This is why I'm not worried about these premades competing with my HTPC business, because very customer so far that has tried it has come crawling back to me after they see their Internet bill LOL. With a real HTPC you can rip your own DVDs and BDs onto your media tank and use zero bandwidth, while these sticks will blow through a data cap like shit through a goose.

Sorry Intel but unless you plan on spending a couple hundred billion rolling out your own national ISP you can give it up, these things just won't have the bandwidth to make them any more than paperweights.

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:Been there, done that

[Anonymous Coward]

http://hexus.net/tech/news/systems/76025-intel-bay-trail-powered-hdmi-stick-pc-available-online/

Just like countless arm-based android mini-PCs.

Except not Arm based, running intel and you can run most of your normal business and entertainment software on it.

So not like arm at all.

First World Problems

[SeaFox]

And here I worry about losing memory sticks because they're so small.
"Dammit! I left my computer in my pocket and it went through the wash..."

Re:more power

[Anonymous Coward]

Get a core i5 NUC..
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/nuc/overview.html

I always liked 'full sized' PC's myself, but the NUC can't be beat for some things, and is more than enough for 90% of all 'normal' computer users.
Plus..
When someone is all cranky about having computer issues it is so nice to just walk over to them, pull out this little thing, swap it and just bring their pc back to shop to re-image/repair.

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.

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

[ihtoit]

my database server is a VIA Epia M MiniITX with 512MB DDR and 1TB spinny SATA. Runs off a 35W solar pile. If you don't include the solar pile, the whole setup cost me change out of £140 (I bought the board in 2005).

Re:more power

[suutar]

mount a few dozen of these on your clothes and have a wearable beowulf :)

Re:What DRIBBLE!

[Provocateur]

..i agree, but I think he was holding back for some reason.

Re:I used to want something kind of like this

[sensei moreh]

Basically, a minimal PC that you would plug into all the I/O hardware, so that you could bring it anywhere, plug it into someone else's hardware, always have all your files and programs there.

This is what I want in my phone (in addition, or course, to the phone actually working as a phone)

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

[ihtoit]

don't take this the wrong way, but my database server works fine. It's not a Warcraft hub. It has a maximum of six concurrent ordinary users (all whitelisted with a denial-by-default access portal and localhost-only admin access). It doesn't need four cores or 16GB of RAM. It's future proofed for its purpose until the universe dies. Or it does. Or the database itself outlives its utility. Which is unlikely because I've been stress testing it for 5 weeks now and it hasn't even twitched through several million random string queries (as well as quite a few real queries which with the speed the results came back you wouldn't even think there was a stress test going on).

Re:I used to want something kind of like this

[ihtoit]

it's called a 16GB usb flash drive (£8.99 at PC World! The hell happened to the price of flash memory??) with a bootable Debian derivative installed on it, plugged into $random_terminal and booted.

The ONLY prerequisites for such a system are the flash drive, the terminal being x86/32 compatible, having 512MB RAM or more and able to boot from USB.

Re:more power

[SeaFox]

Imagine a beowulf wardrobe of those!