Intel Unveils Tiny Next Unit of Computing To Match Raspberry Pi 194
MrSeb writes "Details of a new, ultra-compact computer form factor from Intel, called the Next Unit of Computing (NUC) are starting to emerge. First demonstrated at PAX East at the beginning of April, and Intel's Platinum Summit in London last week, NUC is a complete 10x10cm (4x4in) Sandy Bridge Core i3/i5 computer. On the back, there are Thunderbolt, HDMI, and USB 3.0 ports. On the motherboard itself, there are two SO-DIMM (laptop) memory slots and two mini PCIe headers. On the flip side of the motherboard is a CPU socket that takes most mobile Core i3 and i5 processors, and a heatsink and fan assembly. Price-wise, it's unlikely that the NUC will approach the $25 Raspberry Pi, but an Intel employee has said that the price will 'not be in the hundreds and thousands range.' A price point around $100 would be reasonable, and would make the NUC an ideal HTPC or learning/educational PC. The NUC is scheduled to be released in the second half of 2012."
Not bad, but still missing the point... (Score:5, Insightful)
A design that, sans CPU, optimistically would cost 4 times as much as raspberry pi? CPUs that by themselves notably cost at least $250 right now?
To get to the Raspberry pi functionality, looking at $350 investment. That's more than an order of magnitude more expensive. I know the solution will be more powerful than raspberry pi, but the nearly all the excitement around raspberry pi revolves around price point.
They don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
that embedded computing is not about HDMI and USB ports. Give me serial peripherals, I2C, Ethernet, and all this in a *single* system-on-chip, so I don't have to add support chips around the core.
In what respect does it match the Raspberry pi? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not bad, but still missing the point... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not bad, but still missing the point... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm thinking the critical variable will be availability. If you're waiting forever for your Raspberry Pi or end up paying a scalper a higher price, higher priced commercial offerings like this may very well win out. Honestly I don't think Raspberry Pi is going to ever manage to produce enough to meet demand at their current price target.
Re:Not bad, but still missing the point... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, but nobody's missing the point.
Intel didn't draw any comparison to the Raspberry Pi (unsurprisingly, since this is far more comparable to the Mac Mini platform), so they're not missing the point.
Extremetech knew that controversy generates page views generates ad revenue, so when they drew a NUC/R-Pi comparison, they knew exactly what they were doing -- bullshitting to generate controversy. They're not missing the point of a modern, ad-fueled tech site, this is how it's "supposed" to work.
Slashdot is just like a modern, ad-fueled tech site, but with lower overhead due to no writers and no real editors -- the more stories they approve, the better, and again, if it contains "controversy" (i.e. bullshit) from upstream, that just means more page views, cha-ching! So they're not missing the point.
If anything, maybe you're missing the point -- you seem to think these sites are about news, not about selling your eyeballs to advertisers for money. It's all about money, nothing about news.
Price be damned (Score:4, Insightful)
IMHO, the goal should be to make a ubiquitous embedded platform for building appliances. To that end, the device needs to be low power so that it could run on batteries. It also need to run a real OS e.g. Linux but the catch here is that it needs to completely boot in a few seconds at most especially if it's faceless. Products from Technologic Systems make great strides towards this but their sub-2-second boot times are to Busybox and don't include USB initialization. USB adds another 4 seconds to the boot time. Six seconds is reasonable for a faceless system but anything longer than that and the user will wonder if it's working or not. Booting to Debian takes way too long. Beyond this, such systems need to be tolerant of power loss. Running off batteries means a real power switch. Any file system that takes minutes to check after a power loss is out.
Make it so.
Re:Nicely expandable. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nicely expandable. (Score:0, Insightful)
Actually it's not Fucking Slashdot, the author of the article at ExtremeTech makes the comparison to the Raspberry Pi. The headline is a fair summery.
Re:Nicely expandable. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Nicely expandable. (Score:5, Insightful)
You may have heard of it but if not, it's a little thin on summaries but other than that, while not perfect, I'll bet it's a lot like what Slashdot was back in the day.
Re:Nicely expandable. (Score:4, Insightful)