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.
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A) I don't really think that anyone but the person who wrote the Slashdot headline actually thinks this thing and the Rasberrpy Pi belong in the same category.
B) At this point, we have nothing but complete speculation as to what this will cost or what you will get for whatever that cost is. However, your $250 number was way off base. A Core i3 Sandy Bridge can be found for $100 right now, a price that only figures to go down significantly in the months until this new board's release, since Sandy Bridge is
Re:Not bad, but still missing the point... (Score:5, Informative)
A) I don't really think that anyone but the person who wrote the Slashdot headline actually thinks this thing and the Rasberrpy Pi belong in the same category.
RTFA. The comparison to Rasberrpy Pi was in the article.
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A) I don't really think that anyone but the person who wrote the Slashdot headline actually thinks this thing and the Rasberrpy Pi belong in the same category.
RTFA. The comparison to Rasberrpy Pi was in the article.
Also in the article was the statement that it
targets digital signage and kiosks
which is not really the Pi-in-the-skies forte.
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FMAU (F... Marketing As Usual)
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They said specifically they had the mobile socket. Find me a mobile core i3 sandy bridge for $100.
Re:Not bad, but still missing the point... (Score:4, Insightful)
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The company I work for wanted a cheap, portable computer for mobile archiving. We found an i5 quad core/4GB ram/750GBhdd for about $375 at the local Best Buy, not even on sale. And that includes the processor, the monitor, and a VGA output.
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You got that right. With Best Buy tottering, we're on the trailing edge of the happy days. The cheap buys are going to be no more.
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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.
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Honestly I don't think Raspberry Pi is going to ever manage to produce enough to meet demand at their current price target.
I am not sure if they will either, but it I do not see why making more should make the price go up. When we are talking economies of scale, the price invariably goes down, not up.
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.
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I'm fairly sure that this will come with a bundled CPU. Look at the heatsink/fan assembly -- it's like a laptop. Asking consumers to fiddle around with that would be a bit silly.
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Not just that, but this is a double sided board. Making any installation thicker than a Rasp. Pi.
I don't see why they can't just make a true bare bone board at a very low price point.
Nevermind. No profit margins on a $5 board.
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If the article is correct in guessing the whole thing comes in at around $100 (including CPU), I would be very interested. (To me the specs would imply look more like $200-$225). This would be a perfect "dumb terminal" with enough power to run a browser locally so you get sound, video and flash games (which don't work on an real dumb terminal, e.g. x11). The Pi would cannot do that.
The Mac Mini, by comparison, is over $500. This Intel does
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That's a big problem with the article, a *lot* of guessing. Intel seemed merely to say 'kiosks and signage, and probably not near the thousands of dollars'. There is a whole world of difference between that and 'a raspberry pi killer for $100' that the article leaps to..
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Simply put, the article is a heaping load of shit. The board alone, minus CPU, RAM, drive(s), enclosure, etc., might POSSIBLY come in at $100, but a complete system would be AT LEAST $500. And those CPUs are like burning furnaces. It'll take a pretty sophisticated cooling system to keep them from burning up, and it will likely be pretty noisy.
But this is FAR more powerful than you need for a dumb terminal or thin client. An Atom can do what you're talking about (browser, flash games, sound).
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I dunno, video playback and flash games are quite CPU intensive. Unfortunately, I have yet to see hardware acceleration work properly in Flash for Linux (for playing youtube videos - and many are not available in the HTML5 test).
That said, a little Atom box might work, I haven't tried extensively. So far I've simply found it cheaper and simpler to get
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CPUs that by themselves notably cost at least $250 right now?
To get to the Raspberry pi functionality, looking at $350 investment.
You can buy a 3.06GHz i3 for $100 from Amazon [amazon.com] right now.
Plus from reading the article, it sounds like the $100 price point is what Intel is planning on targetting with some sort of Core-i series CPU included.
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Price-wise, Birang, speaking to Just Press Start, says the NUC will “not be in the hundreds and thousands range,” and that Intel is still looking at “different kinds of SKUs.” It almost certainly won’t be as cheap as the $25 Raspberry Pi, but a price point around $100 would be realistic. Judging by the heatsink and fan assembly, the NUC will probably come with a CPU pre-installed — and hopefully some RAM, too.
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Judging by the heatsink and fan assembly,
So the case comes with that baked in, but at the same time:
a CPU socket that takes most mobile Core i3 and i5 processors,
So basically, we have a demo unit, unclear marketing, and lots of speculation.
It is not unheard of for specialty cases to come with custom cpu coolers, even when they don't come with processors, so the conjecture that a device including a custom cooler logically includes a processor is pretty baseless.
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Bzzzzt. Thank you for playing. You lose, unfortunately. We all lose. This thing has the MOBILE socket, not the colossal desktop socket. Mobile processors are much more expensive than that. You'll be lucky to see the BARE BOARD come in at $100. If the article implies the CPU is included for $100, the article is SPECTACULARLY WRONG.
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These are pretty cool: http://www.gumstix.com/ [gumstix.com]
Super tiny!
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Yeah, i agree. This is a 100$ motherboard... a tiny motherboard yes, but still completely useless without ram, cpu, and blah.
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Why are there so many songs about raspberries
and what's on the other side?
Raspberries are visions, but only illusions,
and raspberries have nothing to hide.
So we've been told and some choose to believe it.
I know they're wrong, wait and see.
Someday we'll find it, the raspberry connection.
The lovers, the dreamers and me.
Who said that every wish would be heard
and answered when wished on the morning star?
Somebody thought of that and someone
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I thought that while it did sell out, they haven't beent able to fulfill any orders due to regulatory issues? So far money has been spent, but product has not moved...
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The regulatory stuff was cleaned up within a couple weeks of them saying they needed to do it, I believe. They needed to do the regulatory stuff because they ended up selling 100k units, not their anticipated close to 10k developer units - which wouldn't have needed the certs.
Stop spreading lies. So far they sold ~5K units and distributors are still "registering interest" instead of selling. Orders (that turned out to be preorders) made an HOUR after the launch are still not fulfilled (mine was pushed from June to August again ...).
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Of course, that raises questions too. For digital signage, who in the world is going to pay for an x86 solution? For kiosks I could see it (though probably not particularly exciting), but digital signage buying into x86 seems unlikely..
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Also, customers are likely to expect to be able to do things like 'yeah, just put this powerpoint I made up on the screen' or 'Here's the flash intro our brand consultant put together'... Much easier
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.
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Atmel?
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Maybe do a better comparison? http://www.atmel.com/devices/AT32UC3A0256.aspx [atmel.com] (And even then...)
Re:They don't get it (Score:5, Informative)
Who said 8-bit AVR? Atmel also makes single-chip 32 bit SoCs. With *drumroll* on-chip USARTs and ethernet, exactly what GGP asked for.
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If I had mod points ...
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Maybe, but part of the excitement of Raspberry Pi is that you can hook it up to a TV via HDMI and get either a cheap media center box or computer.
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That's exactly his point. The reason the Raspberry Pi can be hooked up to a TV via HDMI is because the HDMI is on a SoC, so no support peripherals are needed.
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There are a lot of uses for these types of boards for a lot of different types of people. For me, I wanted a board that I could turn an old monitor into an electronic dashboard; VGA would have done the job but HDMI is workable. I went with a BeagleBone with the DVI board for that project, but I would have been better off with a Raspberry Pi had they been available. Another project is much better suited for an Arduino.
But... for pretty much everything you will need some kind of expansion capability, which
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Doesn't mean that you can't use it in embedded applications. Things like the Gertboard should help on that front.
In what respect does it match the Raspberry pi? (Score:4, Insightful)
These are going to fail usability testing so hard. (Score:4, Funny)
Nobody will be able to find the memory ports because they're SO-DIMM.
pun? (Score:2)
they are on the port-side.
External power supply? (Score:3)
I doubt the guts of my laptop are much bigger than that once you tear out the scree, keyboard, DVD drive, superfluous external ports.
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We'll see honest politicians and world peace before we see standard notebook form-factors.
They are "planned obsolescence" almost perfected. If makers could conveniently use only proprietary RAM and hard disks, it would be vendor lock paradise.
HOW ABOUT (Score:2)
Umm? (Score:5, Informative)
Just for giggles, I then compared it to an entirely different device based around a smartphone processor and in an entirely different price bracket. This makes total sense, just trust me.
Now, purely in itself, a standardized teeny-ATX motherboard would be nice(especially if we'll someday be able to get mini-PCIe cards that aren't NICs in any quantity... If Intel is planning one, that seems like a good thing all around: the world is already cluttered with various proprietary teeny-motherboard things, and it'd be nice to have a bit of unification in that area.
However, I'm just not seeing the novelty here: The x86/embedded/industrial market has been rotten with teeny motherboards for almost as long as there has been an embedded x86 market, most laptops are built around small x86 motherboards by necessity, and some comparatively niche players, along with Apple, have released desktop products of not dissimilar size already. Historically, they've been fairly expensive, since minaturization isn't free, and Intel has no reason to cut margins on their silicon if they can avoid it. If Chipzilla has decided to drop the hammer and specify where teeny motherboards Shall put their screw holes, great; but that would be about the only new aspect of all this...
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Great comment; and this one sentence's 4+ levels of LOL. You nailed many of the ironies from TFA and in Intel's design, but left one unmentioned -- Intel and the article seem to be overreaching for a comparison to sip some of the attention from: a nonprofit project by a few academics in the UK. The zillion-dollar-marketing-machine you
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Historically, they've been fairly expensive, since minaturization isn't free
For sure that's some part of it, but the biggest reason is that laptops used to be a business segment with business prices. You paid a huge premium to get things like power savings on the CPU, not because of different production costs but because you were segregating the residential and professional market. There was a rather huge market turnaround when they found out they could make more money selling laptops to everyone rather than have it as a high-price niche, it was a completely different pricing struc
New form factor (Score:4, Interesting)
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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.
Intel are not new to this (Score:3)
You can already get an Atom-powered mini-ITX for only 70$USD [logicsupply.com].
The crazy thing is that you could probably fit two of these new NUC boards into the case of an old C64, along with a power supply and a hard drive.
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Thunderbolt and a $100 price? (Score:2)
So, a motherboard with no RAM and no CPU, in the $100 range, I can see. But with Thunderbolt, too? I know the Thunderbolt cables are a bit pricey because of the chips built into those, but are the Thunderbolt controller chips *that* much cheaper than the cable chips?
Shouldn't be compared to Raspberry Pi (Score:3)
This sounds great. If they can get it to low enough price and don't intentionally cripple it to avoid it eating into their more mainstream product sales, it will be ideal for low power servers, car computers, etc.
BUT... it's not in the same league as the Raspberry Pi, not on price and not on application.
A NUC, with CPU, GPU, RAM, etc, (and presumably a profit margin?) is never going to be in same price range as the Raspberry Pi. It may not be in the 'hundreds and thousands range' (note the plural on hundreds) but I can't see this happening for $100 either. Maybe closer to $180 to start with. That alone puts it in a different league than the $30 Raspberry Pi, especially when it comes to education and the potential for it to be damaged. The raspberry Pi is almost disposable compared to this, making it ideal for use by children, for experimentation and hobbies.
And with regards to power consumption, a Raspberry Pi uses what, 2-3 Watts? The NUC, even with a low power mobile processor is never going to match this. Super low power consumption makes the Raspberry Pi useable for applications like small robotics, mobile or external projects where the only power source may be battery, solar, etc. You can run the Raspberry Pi off AA batteries for a decent amount of time.
Also, the fact this requires a fan means it will probably be broken within weeks, if not hours, once placed in hands of experimenting children unless they're simply used as traditional computer devices, in which case there's not much point in using this over a normal PC. The Raspberry Pi's are meant to be tinkered with, have pins for daughter boards that children can make themselves, etc. I can't see many school children making use of the NUC's PCIe expansion ports so easily and affordably!
I think the price point alone kind of rules this out from being widely used in education. Schools may be able to afford one or two per class if they're lucky, but what's the point? They most likely have at least that number of x86 PCs sitting idle in the same room? At least with Raspberry Pi you can have children working in pairs, with a device for each pair, or maybe over time, one each. And if they break it, it's not exactly the end of the world.
Does size really mater? (Score:2)
It's an AppleTV! (Score:2)
It looks just like an AppleTV, but expandable. If they can figure out a cheap way to get a processor and memory on board, it would be an ideal platform for all the XBMC tinkerers out there.
Should be compared to ITX boards instead (Score:2)
First of all, from the summary:
A price point around $100 would be reasonable, and would make the NUC an ideal HTPC or learning/educational PC.
Guess what? Pretty much any cheap computer picked from eBay makes for a great learning/educational PC! What Intel is creating here is a full high-performance general-use computer, not some simple board for embedded projects. A way better comparison could be found from the Nano-ITX and Pico-ITX form factors, which for some reason never really took off (not many products). If you can educate me, why is that, I'd be appreciated. Maybe Mini-ITX was "small enough"?
Sounds rather mundane (Score:2)
Ideal HTPCs have to be fanless (think of the WAF) (Score:2)
With fan noise, no chance of being admitted to the average living room ("Wife Acceptance Factor"). ;-)
Even if you claim to have found the rare bird known as geek girl...
AMD G and Z Series in eoma68 Also ~$100 + coreboot (Score:3)
There are also eoma68 cards in the works using the AMD Fusion APU's that will only use open source firmware so you won't have to settle for EFI or a closed BIOS as you have to with Intel.
1ghz Dual-Core CPU with AMD Radeon HD 6250 GPU,
http://rhombus-tech.net./amd_g_series/ [rhombus-tech.net.]
AMD APUs for Notebooks, Netbooks & Tablets
http://www.amd.com/US/PRODUCTS/NOTEBOOK/APU/Pages/tablet.aspx#3 [amd.com]
AMD Embedded G-Series Platform
http://www.amd.com/us/products/embedded/processors/Pages/g-series.aspx [amd.com]
http://www.amd.com/us/Documents/49282_G-Series_platform_brief.pdf [amd.com]
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you won't have to settle for EFI or a closed BIOS as you have to with Intel.
I don't get the practical benefit of coreboot over EFI/BIOS.
PC104 is obsolete (Score:2)
Curly says... (Score:2)
"Nuc Nuc nuc!!!" Woob woob woob! Nyahhhhhhhh yah yahhhh..."
One of these things is not like the other... (Score:2)
Stupid comparison. Must be a stupid article, I won't bother reading, as obviously they don't know what they are talking about.
Small form factor is not new. ITX (Mini, Nano, Pico) have been around for years and years.
Raspberry Pi is a totally integrated 25$ ultra low power computer not a lot bigger than a thumb drive.
Intel has something that is modular, is 4" by 4" square, will cost over 100$, and not include a CPU, Memory, Etc... and will need a significant power supply.
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I'm betting Slashdot editors ordered a Raspberry Pi and still haven't received it. It consumes 95% of their thoughts and that's why they keep mentioning it everywhere.
Re:amazing (Score:5, Interesting)
If the price is on par with raspberry or just above it this is going to be awesome. 293479x times the power.
Not happening, unfortunately. At retail(newegg.com used, prices for CPUs tend to be pretty similar across the board at a given time) the cheapest LGA1155 CPU is ~$40. 1.6GHz, single core, desktop binned part(unfortunately, low-end mobile CPUs don't seem to be as available in the retail channel, so I couldn't find a number for something in the mobile TDP range). At least it comes with a fan. Now, even such a puny device will brutalize a 700mhz ARM SoC designed to run from whatever battery is slim enough to fit in a contemporary cellphone; but if the CPU alone costs $5 more than the entire rpi, CPU+motherboard is going to run at least double, and RAM and boot volume still haven't been taken care of.
An overwhelmingly more powerful platform, certainly, as one would expect in a PC vs. basically-a-cellphone matchup; but the price delta is about what one would expect as well...
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If the price is on par with raspberry
Um, it isn't. The board will cost more than a Pi. Then there's the CPU. Oh, and the RAM. And there's no SD card slot so it has no storage without buying an add-on.
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Why would you want VGA? Do you really like video signals that go from digital to analog and back to digital again? Or are you still using a CRT?
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Compatibility with pretty much every monitor in circulation. There are lots of older/cheaper flat panels in circulation that don't have a digital input and there are still a few old CRTs hanging arronund as well.
Having to buy a monitor VS being able to use a castoff monitor makes a big difference to the total cost.
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Personally I couldn't care less what a load of shitty old fossil obsolete monitors use. What matters is that TVs and monitors sold NOW all have HDMI, seldom include VGA any more, and are so damn cheap they are practically free.
The specs for this thing scream scream high end HTPC. Any home user who has a use for it already has an HDMI TV. And any industrial user has an HDMI monitor.
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Many countries still do for broadcast TV, especially SD content. e.g. the UK uses MPEG-2 for its DVB-T SD transmissions. I'm sure it would love to switch to AVC and DVB-T2 but that would instantly obsolete any TV or set top box using the existing form
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Ethernet would also be nice too
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Hey, parallel has a lot of good uses.
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IBM Model M.
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VGA = that shit died a decade ago.
No it didn't at least not at the cheap end of the market, most new monitors now have DVI but I see plenty of older ones (both CRT and LCD) that only have VGA and are still perfectly servicable.
Or do you also want your DB9 serial, DB25 parallel and PS/2 ports back?
my latest motherboard (gigabyte Z68AP-D3) has one each of those ports and I wasn't even specifically looking for any of them when I bought it. It doesn't have VGA but there are other motherboards in the same price range that do (I don't use the onboard graphics so I didn't care what interface it had).
Re:Nicely expandable. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nicely expandable. (Score:4, Informative)
It is more comparable to the BeagleBoard from TFS, but Raspberry Pi is more in the news now so it is a reasonable statement.
Re:Nicely expandable. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Nicely expandable. (Score:5, Informative)
It is not a reasonable statement at all. The raspi is being sold for 25 dollars which is essentially a throway price and it will run on USB power. Its small size is actually secondary to its appeal. This thing will cost at least 4 times as much for board and CPU and will need an external brick. The fact that people do not see the difference is astounding. Especially considering boards that are close to this have been on store shelves for years and years. Ever heard of Via?
More than 4x as much... cheapest Socket G1/G2 CPU I can find is $160. For the CPU alone. You still have to buy the board, the memory, the hard drive, the case, and the power brick.
This is *not* a competitor.
And yes, you're absolutely right about Via. They're still making C7-based boards for much cheaper. Atom-based board/cpu combos as well are an option, and honestly, a better option since Via C7 is an 8-year old design, and doesn't do 64-bit.
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Especially considering boards that are close to this have been on store shelves for years and years. Ever heard of Via?
Indeed. The point of this announcement is NOT a smaller or better board, but that fact that Intel is attempting to STANDARDIZE a small form factor. If they are successful at getting OEMs to adopt this, it will mean cheaper devices and interchangeable parts.
Re:Nicely expandable. (Score:4, Informative)
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It needs a Fan? Enough said! If you want I/O look at http://www.beagleboard.com/beaglebone [beagleboard.com]
This is a COMPLETE non-starter for me - and I'm exactly the kind of user the BeagleBoard,Beaglebone, or RasberryPi is trying to attract, i.e. a hobbyist nerd that does software & hardware projects.
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Seems like an apt comparison to me.
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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.
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I think my user account dates back to late 1998, though I might have read the site for a while before finally registering. There never really was a Golden Age of Slashdot, when all the stories were relevant, the summaries were factual (and properly edited), and the submissions were timely. It's pretty much always been the same as today, though the summaries sometimes do seem a bit more trollish these days. Of course, that's probably the fault of the submitters.
If you go back and read the journal entries
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Back then the comments were better, which is why Slashdot was still useful. Now the signal to noise ratio on the comments is much lower. At least in my estimation. Of course, this comment is "off topic" :-)
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" The headline is a fair summery."
And thus now is the winter of our discontent.
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My first thought was that this is a NanoITX board for i3/i5... turns out NanoITX is actually a smaller form factor (less surface area).
This does not compete with RPi at all. It's significantly larger, and will be significantly more expensive. Considering that the CPU alone will cost *at least* $100 (current prices for cheapest Socket G1 I can find is actually $160 and that's not even an i3), it's not going to be hitting the $100 price tag that TFS suggests either.
(reference needed: http://www.logicsupply.co [logicsupply.com]
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Most likely the $100 is for the board itself, not counting the CPU or the memory. So by the time you add all the pieces, at late-2012 prices, you're probably looking at $300, plus disk. So it's 10x the price of a Raspberry Pi, much faster, and burns a lot more power; it's not the same market at all. But it might still be a good desktop computer or media box if it doesn't need a loud fan.
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