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Intel's Compute Card Is a PC That Can Fit In Your Wallet (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Intel mostly missed the boat on smartphones, but the company is trying to establish a firm foothold in the ever-broadening marketplace for connected appliances and other smart things. Intel's latest effort in this arena is its new "Compute Card," a small 94.5mm by 55mm by 5mm slab that includes a CPU and GPU, RAM, storage, and wireless connectivity. Intel hasn't given us specific information about the specs and speeds of its first Compute Cards, but you can expect the fastest ones to approach the performance of high-end fanless laptops like Apple's MacBooks. Intel told us that processors with a TDP of up to 6W could fit inside the Compute Cards, which covers both low-power Atom chips like those that powered early versions of Intel's Compute Stick to full Core M and Y-series Core i5 and i7 CPUs like the ones you find in laptops. Intel says that the card uses a variant of the USB-C port called "USB-C plus extension" to connect with the systems it's plugged into. That connector gives devices direct access to the USB and PCIe buses as well as HDMI and DisplayPort video outputs. The company considers the Compute Card to be a replacement of sorts for the Compute Stick, which Intel says will probably disappear from its roadmap in 2018 or so. The issue with the Compute Stick from Intel's perspective is that its input and output ports were unnecessarily limiting -- it could only connect to HDMI ports and could only accept a limited number of USB inputs. The Compute Card can be slid into a wider variety of enclosures that can use all kinds of ports and display interfaces, and Intel says the Card will also offer a large array of performance and storage options, unlike current Compute Sticks.
with a NUC that can take 64GB of RAM...
If you buy this device, Intel still owns it due to the binary blobs that are required to run things. The future will be open hardware; support RISC-V projects, like this one.
Lets hope it is using the EOMA68 standard.
I have a 1st and 2nd generation stick. Both have issues with Bluetooth and wifi. With such limited capacity for connecting peripherals, that kinda sucks.
Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?
Looks like they just took their compute stick and changed the dimensions a bit.
Did you even read the summary? Specifically, where they said:
So yes, they did just change the dimensions of the Compute Stick, as well as give it different ports and potentially a wider assortment of CPUs. (I prefer the simplicity of the Compute Sticks myself)
Cool technology, in search of an application. Why would I want to carry an underpowered PC around with me?
I could see a $50 version being a cool "WTF it's only $50 so why not" PC to add to a television, I guess?
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
They also shaped in more like say a passport or ID card. The ideally corporate ID card, it monitors your speech, your location and any other biometry they are interested in. So how long before carry it or you will be arrested. How long before being require to present it on demand, so they can check you current state, citizen or declared non-citizen for dissent. Then again they can already do that with smart phones.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
As impressive a feat as this might appear, at first, one must remember that Apple devices running last year's A9X are already faster than the Apple MacBook running Intel's equivalent processor, according to the latest GeekBench numbers - http://wccftech.com/apple-a9xi.... So, I fully expect that newer devices running Apple's A10 or Qualcomm's Snapdragon 821 (that are slightly larger than a credit card due to some additional features that Intel's compute cards lack, such as a touch screen, gyro, motion, barometric, gps, cdma, gsm, lte, wifi, dsp, hsm, etc.) to already be a lot faster than Intel's fastest Compute Cards (assuming that the MacBook remains the benchmark performance).
I think that what Intel's Compute Cards will have going for them will be accessibility, programability, price and the ease of interfacing them to custom devices for developers... That is what Intel should be emphasizing. Vending machines, signage displays, self service kiosks, home automation hubs, assembly line robots, etc. do not need lots of computing power... but they need reliability, availability and dependability with minimal human intervention in some of the harshest environments, every single day of the year.
i'm the creator and guardian of the EOMA68 standard, and someone just brought the intel compute card to my attention on the mailing list. the intel compute card is *exactly* the same size as EOMA68, which in turn is based on legacy PCMCIA casework and connector re-use: credit-card-sized at: 54 x 86 x 5mm. fortunately, from the BBC video, if you check 30 seconds in the connector is completely different (otherwise intel would have a Certification Mark infringment case on their hands): it looks like it's Mini-PCIe which, if that's true, would be a very sensible choice as it contains USB2, one PCIe lane, some GPIO and power.
i do wonder if my discussions with intel over the past couple of years, as well as the crowd-funding campaign which i'm here in taiwan presently to fulfil, have spurred them to go "i know! let's make our own computer card standard just like that guy did because he said "NO" when it came to having hardware-level spying capability in the BIOS through the Intel Management Engine, with the resultant *complete* meltdown from a security perspective as outlined here https://libreboot.org/faq/#int... "
i'll be watching this with interest, because standards, i've learned, live and die by whether the designers have enough foresight to design it with upgradeability in mind, as well as have the balls to say NO when it comes to "adding options" that are not backwards-compatible.