Intel Puts a PC Into an SD Card-Sized Casing 219
New submitter mpicpp points out that Intel has unveiled a PC called Edison, which fits into a casing the size of an SD card.
"Edison is based on Intel’s Quark chip, which it launched last year as its attempt to muscle in on that other flavour-of-the-month market: the so-called Internet of Things. It also reflects the company’s new-found keenness on the 'maker' community. Quark, a 22nm low-power x86 processor with two cores, sits inside Intel’s Arduino-compatible Raspberry Pi-alike Galileo board computer. Edison takes the same chip, connects it to a wee bit of LPDDR2 memory and Flash storage, and plugs in Bluetooth 4.0 Smart — aka LE — and Wi-Fi for broader connectivity."
So, can it play Crysis at full framerates, or...? (Score:2, Insightful)
Okay, kidding. But it does bring up a small question: When can these things get up enough horsepower to allow my laptop more space for battery and disk?
(Also, how much can you cram into it before it overloads on the thermals? I can use LuxRender to destroy a full-blown i7 that way, so it's not like this is just a small CPU problem.)
I guess it's cute and all to make tiny computers, but I'm curious as to when this will translate into something usable on the 'bigger' end, e.g. laptops and servers.
Re:So, can it play Crysis at full framerates, or.. (Score:5, Insightful)
It has enough horsepower today. The Mac Classic got useful work done with a 8 Mhz clock. 400MHz computers from the late 90's were usable then just as well as today. You just need to use software that is designed to use resources efficiently which is more than doable with a stripped down X11 *NIX system.
Re:So, can it play Crysis at full framerates, or.. (Score:4, Insightful)
True dat.
Got rid of my last Pentium III laptop last month, gave it to a woman who wanted her 4 year old kid to leave mommy's laptop alone :) It was my knocking-around-in-the-truck-don't-care-if-it-gets-stolen machine. Debian ran great on it, and as far as I know it still does.
The rest of my machines are various Pentium 4 and Pentium M boxes with the exception of a recently acquired dual-core laptop. Linux runs great on them, too. Only problem I have is USB, they don't have 2.0 onboard so I use cards.
Re:So, can it play Crysis at full framerates, or.. (Score:4, Insightful)