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Intel's New Mini PCs Have New Chips, an Updated Design, and Thunderbolt 3 (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In the last four or five years, Intel's "Next Unit of Computing" (NUC) hardware has evolved from interesting experiments to pace cars for the rest of the mini desktop business. Mini PCs represent one of the few segments of the desktop computing business that actually has growth left in it, and every year the NUC has added new features that make it work for a wider audience. This year's models, introduced alongside the rest of Intel's new "Kaby Lake" processor lineup at CES, include new processors with new integrated GPUs, but that's probably the least interesting thing about them. Thanks to the demise of Intel's "tick-tock" strategy, the processing updates are minor. Kaby Lake chips include smaller performance and architectural improvements than past generations, and the year-over-year improvements have been mild over the last few years. The big news is in all the ways you can get bytes into and out of these machines. There are two Core i3 models (NUC7i3BNK and NUC7i3BNH), two Core i5 models (NUC7i5BNK and NUC7i5BNH), and one Core i7 model (NUC7i7BNH) -- that last one is intended to replace the older dual-core Broadwell i7 NUC and not the recent quad-core "Skull Canyon" model. The Core i3 and i5 versions come in both "short" and "tall" cases, the latter of which offers space for a 2.5-inch laptop-sized SATA hard drive or SSD. The i7 version only comes in a "tall" version. Like past NUCs, all five models offer two laptop-sized DDR4 RAM slots and an M.2 slot for SATA and PCI Express SSDs (up to four lanes of PCIe 3.0 bandwidth is available). Bluetooth and 802.11ac Wi-Fi is built-in. As for the rest of the NUCs' features, Intel has drawn a line between the Core i3 model and the i5/i7 models. All of the boxes include four USB 3.0 ports (two on the front, two on the back), a headphone jack, an IR receiver, an HDMI 2.0 port, a gigabit Ethernet port, a microSD card slot, a dedicated power jack, and a new USB-C port that can be used for data or DisplayPort output (the dedicated DisplayPort is gone, and this port can't be used to power the NUCs). In the i5 and i7 models, the USB-C port is also a full-fledged Thunderbolt 3 port, the first time any of the smaller dual-core NUCs have included Thunderbolt since the old Ivy Bridge model back in 2012.
http://hackaday.com/2016/11/28/neutralizing-intels-management-engine/
You pulled a Hillary.
Suggestion for Intel: just put in it a second gigabit ethernet (with OSS drivers, please) and become the king of the security-concious/I-like-to-control-my-network crowd. I would buy it just to avoid searching into the compatibility matrix of Tomato/OpenWRT/etc
You can get a gigabit USB 3.0 to ethernet cable that is really short that does much the same thing. With 4 USB 3 plugs you should be able to have a total of 5 gigabit network interfaces.
Simply not the same as a PCIe asic. I dont care how much theoretical bandwidth there is on USB3, or that they did away with polled mode. It is not the same if nothing else but because it has to go through two different driver stacks for data to enter and leave the media. The idea here is security consciousness, not simple function. Smaller attack surface is better.
The point of buying an Intel NUC for pfsense is that we want 2x (or more) Intel NICs, which tend to be well supported by Linux and BSD drivers.
Sure, I could buy one of thousands of other SFF machines (some of them even have multiple Intel NICs) or I could buy a USB 3.0 / 3.1 to RJ45 external NIC.
I'd rather just buy a $400 box from Intel (with Intel's expected level of quality and polish) with 2x or more onboard Intel NICs.
Being able to put up to 32gb of DDR4 SO-DIMMs in these for Pfsense is also awesome, as snort with a ton of rules and squid reverse proxy and a VPN package and DNSCRYPT can all start taxing the ram.
Thunderbolt just reminds me how "Intel appear to be doing whatever they can to limit application of Thunderbolt to eGPU by making vendors use 25W PCIe slots, instead of 75W or making Thunderbolt enclosures way too expensive. *Appears* to be a company survivalism/profit strategy to prevent migration towards CUDA/OpenCL GPU-based processing instead of Intel's CPU processing."
https://www.techinferno.com/in...
https://www.techinferno.com/in...
Whereas the AMD model, unless it turns out that the single encrypted blob is actually multiple blobs, like in the intel firmware, is a single signed os image booted by the ARM Trustzone processor built into the newer CPUs/SoCs as a 'management, encryption, and authentication processor'.
If it turns out not to be a chain of encrypted blobs like the Intel ME firmware turned out to be (after 6-8 years!) then it will be impossible to disable or replace it without AMD offering a 'trustzone kill' signed image that does nothing other than spin the cpu up, or if it MUST provide more features, provide the source code and prove how the size matches when encrypted or signed.
Another little device not powered by the common power available in industrial or commercial or automotive power systems. For many use cases this is a non-starter, and the number one reason I bought a Fit-PC instead.
Simply not the same as a PCIe asic. I dont care how much theoretical bandwidth there is on USB3, or that they did away with polled mode. It is not the same if nothing else but because it has to go through two different driver stacks for data to enter and leave the media. The idea here is security consciousness, not simple function. Smaller attack surface is better.
No, but Thunderbolt 3 is PCIe (either x2 or x4, depending on the configuration/power mode), with a full 40GB/s of bandwidth. So what you do is you get a Thunderbolt PCIe Expansion Box (something like this), and put standard PCIe NIC cards into it -- whichever ones you prefer.
(What would be awesome is if someone came out with a multi-ethernet Thunderbolt 3 breakout box. The best I've found is dual 10Gbit Ethernet to Thunderbolt, but something like 8 x 1Gbit to Thunderbolt 3, with a TB3 chaining port would be pretty awesome for a box like this. Intel -- are you listening?)
Yaz
http://www.qotom.net/goods-129...
You're welcome.
I hate printers.
Gerrymandering is a pure red herring here. States don't vote as districts for any state-wide or nation-wide office. The fact that majorities in more states voted for Trump is something you can't get away from.
The US was never designed to be The United States of New York.
The same evil unfair skew you're whining about is also present in the Congress for the same exact reason.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
> That's Trump logic,
No. That's the logic of the founders. If you don't live in California, it sounds pretty cool. That's why we even have a country to begin with. No one else wants to be Sacramento's b*tch. That would get old fast for the rest of us.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
A part of the Silicon Valley hive mind debunked this Russian hackers thing so why are members of the peanut gallery still even clinging to it?
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I sure wish these things could run Mac OS out of the box. I'm not sure the Mac mini or Mac Pro will ever be refreshed.
States vote as districts for Speaker of the House, who is third in line to the Presidency.
I've tried a few models NUC and Intel Stick over the last few years, the fans are tiny running at a million RPM so they would start whining a few minutes and then crash because the thing got too hot.
Wake me up when they come with a sub-$100 model that has 4G of memory and runs Android, Linux and doesn't overheat. If I wanted a $400 barebone, I'd buy from any number of manufacturers that had the thermal stuff figured out a decade ago (eg. Shuttle) .
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Is it? How many megalopolises were there worldwide in 1776, let alone in he US?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Sounds like this would make a great little media box, but it's a shame it doesn't (appear to) have HDMI CEC support -- it looks like adapters cost about as much as a Raspberry Pi (which supports HDMI CEC out of the box!).
It seems like a silly feature, but it's been incredibly useful for my RPi media center -- the ability to switch between an app (Yatse) and a physical remote is very handy.
Why must all hardware be only in black and silver?
Apple did only a few things right, and attractive hardware is one of them (the others were: having a gadget ready to use after unboxing, and streamlining the interface to eliminate fiddly, irrelevant and distracting bits).
Every time I look at new machines, I am struck by how we insist on making them uglier than dump trucks.
Alternative Right.
Realistically, the J1900 is powerful enough to handle any routing duties a small network will throw at it. VLANs, VPN encryption, packet inspection etc are all fine. The pfSense boards are filled with people using these units with multiple VPN tunnels and getting close to gigabit.
For a home router, unencrypted, running snort and a few other things but with the majority of traffic not VPN? It'll handle gigabit speeds without breaking a sweat.
I hate printers.
Since 1 dec 2016 I got a new job and was allowed to choose my own laptop, but I choose a NUC6 i5 with 2x 24" screens, and put Linux Mint 18 on it. The first few days it totally froze on me a few times, but after upgrading to Mint 18.1 and Cinammon 3.0.6 it has now run uninterrupted for 2 weeks already.
I have the CPU temperature and performance monitor in the footer, it is currently 39.3 deg Celsius without any noise at all (I have no music on so it is totally silent here). I run PhpStorm, 2 Firefoxes with in total 21 tabs, a terminal with 3 tabs, 1 vagrant VM, 1 Chrome browser with 4 tabs, 1 file manager and 1 PDF viewer. It is not cheap, but a lot cheaper than laptops with the same specs. Colleagues with Win of Mac laptops do have their fan running audibly.
My previous PCs were a MacMini and an MacBookAir, but I would not want to switch back.