Intel's 4-inch "Next Unit of Computing" to cost $400

http://techreport.com/discussions.x/23066

by phren0logy • 14 years ago

59 52 14 years ago

astrodust3• 14 years ago

I would've thought that Intel could make something like this for a much lower price-point. That's not even price-competitive with a small Dell unit.

sp332• 14 years ago

Very small form factor computers cost more than that. And good luck hitting the 17W target.

ajross2• 14 years ago

A quick check shows the cheapest sub-ATX machine on dell.com right now at $399, and they have a mini-ATX box for $299. Both are configured with Pentium- or Celeron-branded (the "value" lines -- higher power, some features like AVX and VT-x disabled, etc...) Sandy Bridge CPUs, not the low power Ivy Bridge in this box.

This really isn't a bad price for what you're getting, though it isn't out of range of what you'd pay for the same components (in a bigger box) from newegg.

riffic• 14 years ago

What you see now is an initial price. This is not what the machines will cost 6-12 months down the road. In all likelihood you'll see these drop in price pretty quickly, perhaps after xmas.

astrodust3• 14 years ago

If it's a product for industrial applications, I doubt there's a Santa factor.

For whatever reason, embedded components seem to fight Moore's Law tooth and nail.

fuzzythinker• 14 years ago

Reduce it further and pair it with Google glass or similar device, minority report style interface that can sense your arm and head movements and it will truly be a "personal" computer you can bring anywhere.

IsTom• 14 years ago

And battery-backpack. Perhaps in some near future we will have a better power source.

excuse-me4• 14 years ago

"Primarily for digital signage" It has a core i3 cpu, 4Gb RAM and will have USB3 and thunderbolt.

Perhaps I'm out of touch - but since when does a moving sign display need gigaflops? Wouldn't a Raspberry pi for 1/20 of the cost, and which can drive a full HD video, be sufficient?

kenrikm2• 14 years ago

+1 I made almost the same comment. Raspberry Pi can do 1080p and since most digital signage systems are just running on web technology it can more then handle the load.

swalsh• 14 years ago

Imagine you're a clothing company, you get a 60" monitor and hook it up in a mall. Then you take one of these PC's connect a HD camera to it, then proceed to perform some image processing on the picture in real time. As a person walks past the monitor show them walking, but replace their cloths with the companies cloths. That would catch my attention.

jmsduran• 14 years ago

An interesting idea, but I can imagine that under realistic constraints such a solution would look rather tacky, unless the person was standing completely still.

minikomi2• 14 years ago

This exists at the Lacoste store in Shibuya.

Also, this is pretty cool: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_tkYCtIMOc

linh• 14 years ago

Oh wow. This is funny. I know someone who spent 2-3 years developing the technology for his phd (it's pretty complex to get it right/good). Anyway, the fashion industry is a pretty conservative industry (weird huh?) so he has a hard time monetizing it even though it has a lot of potential.

throwaway54-762• 14 years ago

But can your ARM Raspberry Pi run Windows 3.1 or whatever x86 OS your business's legacy signage program runs on?

excuse-me4• 14 years ago

The signage program is almost certainly displaying html or video.

underwater• 14 years ago

I've seen a lot of signage that runs on Flash. This is probably because that's what designers use, and also because new adverts are delivered over slow connections (GPRS?)

At any rate, the $400 cost would be minuscule compared to the cost of the screen itself, housing and installation costs. Why try and save a little money and risk having to retrofit or replace the displays in a few years when socially integrated, augmented reality, realtime 3D ads are in vogue.

seanalltogether• 14 years ago

Correct. All the digital signage I've worked on in the past couple years was Flash/AIR based.

JoelSutherland• 14 years ago

I'm now seeing some HTML5 stuff. Certainly having an Ivy Bridge i3 available for $400 will accelerate that trend.

minikomi2• 14 years ago

Slightly off topic.. There was one day here in Tokyo where the feed for the JR signs had somehow broken, and the "train approaching" LED banners here and there were showing a lovely mess of mangled XML.

hollerith2• 14 years ago

future versions will have usb3 and thunderbolt. this version has only usb2 and hdmi.

roc• 14 years ago

> "Wouldn't a Raspberry pi for 1/20 of the cost, and which can drive a full HD video, be sufficient?"

Not for arbitrary arrays of potentially-disparate displays -- which is where a lot of signage software is going/has gone (being able to marry varying display technologies, resolutions, dpi, etc). While they likely don't need to wring every last flop out of an i5, they do need to be capable of substantially more than driving canned video to a single HD display.

And the more displays an off-the-shelf unit can drive, the cheaper/easier installation and expansion becomes.

qq66• 14 years ago

The CPU is such a small fraction of the total cost of digital signage (primary costs are the display, the space rental, and the service) that it hardly matters whether they overspec the CPU.

astrodust3• 14 years ago

Exactly. Saving potentially 50W on the CPU seems almost meaningless when the signs themselves will be several hundred W each.

ChuckMcM• 14 years ago

"... since when does a moving sign display need gigaflops?"

It doesn't of course. The argument Intel makes is the same one they have made in the past which is "here is a box your generic engineer can program that is cheap enough to run a sign."

The argument is based on a time/cost to market one. Lets assume you make 1,000 digital signs, and the total cost to the end customer is $10,000 per sign. So you have $10M in potential (but unrealized) revenue sitting there. You can either spend a year developing the software for this sign using an expensive embedded systems programmer for a year at $150,000, or you can spend two months developing the software with a cut-n-paste coder fresh out of college (annual salary $45K so 2 months is $7,500. So your RaPi solution costs $50 each (when you include a case and cables) vs $400 each. So over 1,000 signs that is $350,000 in 'parts' cost extra to use the Intel solution but you also save $142,500 in labor costs, and you are in the market 10 months earlier.

So is that time to market advantage (and the cheaper programmer) a win or not? And since you're looking at $10M in revenue $142,500 is about 1.5% of your margin your giving up.

And finally there is the point that if you do decide to make digital signs out of RaPi's and you can't get the crappy blob-of-bits Broadcom tosses in for their GPU control what are your options? You've got a volume of 10,000 and Broadcom could care less. With Intel they will, with proper documentation, give you every piece of information you need, they already have the support team in place to support their huge OEM business.

When you come at the problem that way it looks a bit different.

excuse-me4• 14 years ago

True, although with the Intel box you also have PSU, cooling and cabling and you find that multi-headed video cards and distribution cables to drive lots of display end up costing far more than putting a single board Linux box in the back of each TV.

But the real argument against a Wintel sign is to head over to thedailywtf.com any day and see pictures giant billboards showing BSOD or asking for a driver

dllthomas• 14 years ago

>So is that time to market advantage (and the cheaper programmer) a win or not? And since you're looking at $10M in revenue $142,500 is about 1.5% of your margin your giving up.

It's about 1.5% of your revenue. What it is of your margin depends on what your other costs are (and it's likely much higher).

bitwize2• 14 years ago

When they started running Windows.

And they started running Windows because the industry demanded it. Easier to program and whatnot.

kenrikm2• 14 years ago

The Raspberry Pi seems like it would make a much more cost effective system for digital displays (1080p support + linux/Web backend) Having built several digital signage systems myself with off the shelf parts for < $200.. $400 seems really steep.

joezydeco2• 14 years ago

Do your systems typically run off Wifi or hardwired ethernet? There's no wifi built-in on the Rpi. Personally I'd get a Pandaboard ES instead.

whyenot2• 14 years ago

A PandaBoard ES is $182 from Digi-Key. A RPi with a usb wifi adapter is $50 ($35 + $15).

brightrhino2• 14 years ago

Oh look, intel invented a mac mini without a hard drive.

hollerith2• 14 years ago

The TDP of the processor in the current Mac mini is 35 W (which is what makes the mini different from most desktop systems, whose processors usually have TDPs in the 65 W to 95 W range) whereas the TDP of the (Ivy Bridge) processor in this thing is 17 W, which I am guessing is what makes it possible to shrink the size so much relative to the Mac mini.

rhplus• 14 years ago

The Mac mini is 7.7 x 7.7 x 1.4 inches. That's almost four times the volume of this thing (4 x 4 x ? inches).

http://www.apple.com/macmini/specs.html

brightrhino2• 14 years ago

The mac mini is also available with a quad core i7 and a hard drive. Cooling is already designed into the mac mini enclosure, which the article mentions has not been finalized in the version shown. I don't see this as much of an accomplishment.

cheatercheater3• 14 years ago

Came here to post that. The fact that Intel's version, years later, sports half the TDP and half the size isn't an innovation, it's just an optimization. As much as I hate Apple hardware I must again admit they did a thing there worth considering. No idea why you got the downvotes.

tantalor• 14 years ago

"Next" might not be the best choice for a computer hardware trademark. I'm going to bet somebody else owns that trademark already.

bitwize2• 14 years ago

Yep. Definitely not a RasPi contender.

It looks just like a PC104 board -- and is priced at a point that's dirt cheap for PC104 kit but still nowhere near in RasPi's league.

mey• 14 years ago

At 101.6mm x 101.6mm it makes this smaller than a Nano-ITX and just slightly larger than the Pico-ITX

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nano-ITX http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pico-ITX http://www.mini-itx.com/

sciurus• 14 years ago

"Inside the box, you'll find a mobile Core i3 processor paired with the HM65 chipset"

This is nice. I wish Intel would sell mobile processors (or motherboards with integrated mobile processors) directly to consumers. The lowest voltage Intel Core desktop processor I can find is the i3-2120T at 35 watts; most are 65 watts. Intel's Core mobile processors go as low as 17 watts.

cheatercheater3• 14 years ago

They're not as fast though. And unless you really care about size, a 65 watts doesn't matter. I've got a dead silent system with an 85W gpu and a geforce 9800 gxt+. (one fan in it, but it's a low voltage Noctua that can't be heard even with my ear right against it. psu is fanless)

I appreciate your sentiment for colder hardware. I do hope it's going to get there some day, but not at the cost of speed. I think we've reached a situation where it's becoming more and more practical to have silent PCs.

wavephorm• 14 years ago

  Inside the box, you'll find a mobile Core i3 processor

What? That's 2 generations ago. I have a 3 year old Atom system about that size. Sure, an i3 is faster, that's nice, but just let me know when Intel's top-of-the-line chip can run on a motherboard this size. If Intel thinks they can still produce new CPU's for the ATX form factor, they're nuts.

reitzensteinm2• 14 years ago

It's probably a Sandy Bridge i3, which is basically current gen (the full line of Ivy is not out yet).

zokier• 14 years ago

"Core i3" is just a brand name, it doesn't refer to any specific chip/generation/architecture. I fully except that Ivy Bridge i3's will be released eventually. And Sandy Bridge (what this box probably has inside) is just one generation behind. And I don't see any reason why you couldn't make similar box with Ivy Bridge i7.

If you think that Intel could now stop producing new CPUs for ATX form factor, you are the one who are nuts. As far as I know, Intel has no plans to leave the desktop market.

reitzensteinm2• 14 years ago

I was down voted earlier for suggesting it was going to be an order of magnitude more expensive than the R-Pi (until I argued my case):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3909113

While the difference in price between the two is negligible for any serious commercial work, this isn't nearly the game changer the R-Pi is. You're not going to put one of these in your garden powered by solar.

cheatercheater3• 14 years ago

Any idea if the new version will use a mini-dp port for the thunderbolt output? I think that might be a bit unreasonable for such a platform where the connector needs to be fairly robust? I can imagine a lot of those hanging by the cable.

Intel's 4-inch "Next Unit of Computing" to cost $400

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