NetFRAME managed to do that fifteen years ago, had a backplane that you just plugged slot-mounted mini-computers on a card into. Think they had a custom build of NT for it. I remember they were bought by MPC, and since MPC is defunct I dunno if anyone still has the intellectual property or not. Would be interesting to see it brought up to modern standards.
This looks like Raspberry Phi on steroids. However, if some day in future, I get a powerful system even on a 10"x10" dimension, then it would be awesome.
Stacked PCBs, put a full ivy bridge, an MXM-B graphics slot, 2 USB3 on a couple of stacked PCBs with Heatpipes coming away to an assembly and it would be very compact.
Nice that Intel have decided to give us higher performance in these form factors, although for digital signage I'm not sure how necessary such performance is. It's just a shame it's taken them something like 5 or more years to get there.
It looks like a handy gadget to carry around on trips for presentations that require full PC horsepower. Plug it into the HDMI on any big screen and control it with a phone using Bluetooth or WiFi.
"...plus OEMs can always do their own designs—so it's hard to specule at this point."
I agree. It's very hard for me to specule too. What I wish we could get is a fundamental redesign of how the components on a board are laid out and how the MB is designed to make it as compact as possible. Kind of like what Silverstone did for the computer case with the FT03 (although I think it was still quite flawed). Yes, there are ultrabooks available but I want something that enables full access to the highest performance parts and that's designed around maximum cooling efficiency. Something like a modular system block that can incorporate all of the necessities of a top of the line system that's abstracted from a separate storage subsystem. They could even incorporate a hot-pluggable msata SSD drive as a system drive. They should stop aiming for some tiny niche market and design such a system with broader flexibility in mind.
Maybe this is how Intel is going to compete with ARM in the embedded field ? ATOM the way it stands, in my mind is no competition. By far.
In the low power market it would not work very well. But I could see it being handy in a few cases. Among those that were already mentioned in the article.
A likely find in the wild would be something like this, a copy of Windows embedded, on POS systems country wide ( U. S. ) Another could be a customized board with improved graphics to make a decent gaming console.
For me personally. We're 100% off-grid. Our power is provided by solar / wind. Plus the once a week use of a 30kW generator to pump water into a holding tank. Anyway, a small low-enough power system like this would come in very handy around here. For us, that has been our holy grail lately. A system that draws minimal power, but provides enough horsepower to not feel like an under-performing laptop. 50-60WH range would be incredibly nice Including monitor. Well that, and in a reasonable price range.
Maybe, though, I am just dreaming. But I do know we have the ability / technology to do so. It just seems that ODM's/OEM's just want to make products that use more, and more power.
It will be interesting to see where this sort of thing leads us.
We travelled in the Australian outback for a year witha camper trailer. It has 120W solar panels and a 120Ah 12v AGM deep cycle battery for all our power (except for occasional stops in caravan parks).
For compute, we brought a couple of 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo laptops and 12v DC chargers to avoid 240v inverter inefficiencies. Also, we removed the laptop batteries, as charging a battery off a battery is very inefficient. Each laptop pulled from the deep cycle battery about 1.8-2.5 amps (i.e. 22-30 watts). We used to mess around with holiday pics, email, skype, watch TV/movies quite a lot and managed fine with these. Only time we had to be careful with power was when we set up the camper trailer under trees.
These laptops are feeling a bit slow now, but I would assume current models would be faster and would draw about the same.
Well, we're a bit less spartan here. Our panels yield about 2.5kW total peak. !kW worth pump two gallons water per minute from 500 feet down. The rest charge the battery bank. Our battery bank is 2250AH, flooded lead acid L16 2v batteries run in series to 12V out to a salvaged ambulance 2500W inverter.
For wind, we use two Southwest windpower AIR-X 400W turbines. Being at 5900 feet, we get plenty of wind a lot of the time. Anything bigger would be asking for trouble ( the wind here has a habit of destroying wind turbines ).
We run laptops now. For the most part, they are "O K". For gaming they're not so great. For encoding media they're terrible. Myself I run an AMD based laptop that can play GTA IV fairly well I suppose. While encoding movies really is not that good. Despite the fact it is a quad core system. The lower frequency ( 1.4Ghz ) just does not cut it for some things.
So enough history. My personal reasons for not wanting to use laptops are many fold.
First expand-ability Though with these as is, not much room other than what you can do with a laptop already.
Second, customization. Laptops have a habit of heating up because of the confined space in which they reside ( internals ). With something like this, I could make a custom case, with near silent cooling. Passed that, I could add multiple drives, without breaking the bank on some high end business / entertainment model laptop With laptops, you're far more restricted in what you can do as far as customization goes in general. You're also restricted in what you can buy, from sellers / manufacturers.
Lastly, I could go on for days, but obviously I wont. We do not need laptops here. They only serve as desktop replacements. Then not even very well at that. Something like this might work, while it also may not. Ivy Bridge is looking very attractive as far as low power goes, and perhaps the next tick will bring us something even better.
Either way, I like what I am seeing here we'll just have to see where it leads.
To the other person who asked where I live - Arizona.
I think you have a very good idea about what you'd like to do with the machines. I wouldn't go that route myself anymore, as I'm no longer a practising enthusiast as it were.
Around 2009 I gave up on customisation, building machines from parts and niche products. Unfortunately my experience over a decade or so was that OS and other software patches would eventually kill the machine, leading to many frustrating hours of working out how to get around it. Eventually I got the feeling that no matter how fast my custom set ups were, downtime of days / weeks negated any speed gains.
With the arrival of kids I became horribly time poor, so stability became the most important aspect of machines for me. I just wanted machines that wouldn't require huge time investment to keep alive. Name brand laptops have fit this very well. So far (touch wood and all that) I'm getting the reliability I need, however, games performance is out the window, as is encoding.
I agree that stability is paramount, With that said, I am not sure what that has to do with customization really. It does mean you have to research the hardware you want to use before buying. Which is what I have always considered ( for the last 5 + years anyhow ) the most important part of the build process. That in of it's self can be time consuming I agree.
When it is all said then done however. You usually ( always ? ) end up with a system to be perfectly happy with. My last system build was exactly that. Perfect. While it was custom, it was nothing like this.
Using a system board like this for me would entail making my own case from scratch. Something I would actually enjoy, but have not yet done to date. In this *case*, that would be the majority of the customization for me. Building my own case, with my idea of perfection in mind. Having had what I consider some really cool ideas for a case design for several years now, I would really like to give it a shot.
With all that said. I have actually considered ripping my laptop apart and building a case around that. But at some point, you have to ask yourself "why". Resale would be non-existent, and you never know how well it would work out in the end. The one reason why i would do this is so that I could overclock the system to have it perform reasonably well.Then enclose it in a case with ample cooling to help keep it happy. Stability then becomes a concern . . . and yeah it is too much trouble to deal with really.
Do I *need* this board to do what I want ? Not really. Would I like this board to work out for my own purposes ? Definitely.
Things may well have got better since my days of system building.
Some of the trouble I had was with buggy motherboard firmware. By the time I had evidence of the problems, the motherboard manufacturer had stopped doing fixes. I eventually stuck to more common big name enthusiast motherboards, which definitely helped.
However, the problem then moved on to integration problems between add on boards. If all the gear was relatively new, things worked fine at first, but as patches came out over the months / years, problems would then appear. Working out which patches to exclude became a long and tedious process. Also, not being able to install important updates like service packs meant the systems either lacked functionality or security.
So, while I found I could research and put together a pretty fast and stable system using big name brands that worked for a while, I'd eventually wind up with trouble. On average this generally started about 18 months in.
At the same time, the big name PC's and laptops at work kept on keeping on. I looked into it and found out that with big name systems that were still in original configuration, there was much better testing by MS etc before release. Also, if a problem did occur in the field, big corporates with loads of these systems would push back the problems on to the vendors and a fix would be released.
Looking at it from a testing perspective, it's impossible for vendors to test all permutations and combinations of kit out there. I did this kind of thing myself when working on closed-system telecom's network nodes. We restricted and had control of every revision of hardware, firmware, OS and application. In order to ensure that every customer system in the field was tested, the number of system configurations rapidly exploded. We did the testing, but it was extremely expensive. To my mind, there is absolutely no way vendors in PC open systems land can come close to this.
Anyway, I'm clearly a little jaded on systems building these days. It used to be a great fun hobby, but the down time when I actually needed to get stuff done killed it for me.
Not jaded at all. In my world, you pay for something, you need to get a quality product. At least where functionality comes into play. You might not get every bell and whistle, but it should work well for at least 3 years. 5 years + was the norm in the 90's.
For what its worth, I've been building systems since 93, and yes now days everyone seems to be shoveling crap out the door. Call it a sign of the times.
I tend to agree with the sign of the times sentiment.
I gave up on Telecom's network R&D in 2007 when my last assignment was to ensure we met uptime contractual agreements, not by fixing the crashes caused by traffic (i.e. phone calls), but by reducing reboot times. It took 40 people 18 months to engineer a new go-faster distributed boot sequence that was much more prone to race condition failures and much harder to maintain, instead of fixing the root cause.
Of course, 18 months later the network traffic had increased to the extent that the improved boot times had not changed the overall annual uptime figures. I.e., 60 man years of work achieved something that was worse than useless.
I chucked the towel in when our design centre was finally asked to look into and fix the root causes of the crashes, but told we only had weeks to do it in.
With that Acronym for a name, I can picture the ad campaign now, Launch will coincide with "The Three Stooges (II)" whatever the title will be. The Stooges and Intel will pair up to promote the NUC and the movie. Maybe market it at Children to get a computor in the Toddler's room The stooges slapstick comedy will involve the NUC bashing around and still working to demonstrate toughness, Moe already says NUC, NUC, NUC. so it is a perfect fit. Selling them toward the untouched market of Pre-preschool would sell Millions, like that, " Your child can read" program.
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38 Comments
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rruscio - Wednesday, May 2, 2012 - link
How about I fill my Lian Li hard drive slots with this thing, and someone builds me an OS that can use multiple CPU's without a nosebleed price.LB-ID - Wednesday, May 2, 2012 - link
NetFRAME managed to do that fifteen years ago, had a backplane that you just plugged slot-mounted mini-computers on a card into. Think they had a custom build of NT for it. I remember they were bought by MPC, and since MPC is defunct I dunno if anyone still has the intellectual property or not. Would be interesting to see it brought up to modern standards.SeleniumGlow - Wednesday, May 2, 2012 - link
This looks like Raspberry Phi on steroids.However, if some day in future, I get a powerful system even on a 10"x10" dimension, then it would be awesome.
Meaker10 - Wednesday, May 2, 2012 - link
Stacked PCBs, put a full ivy bridge, an MXM-B graphics slot, 2 USB3 on a couple of stacked PCBs with Heatpipes coming away to an assembly and it would be very compact.Lonyo - Wednesday, May 2, 2012 - link
Stacked mini boards?http://www.viaembedded.com/en/products/boards/prod...
Like this? (Again, VIA already did it).
Taft12 - Wednesday, May 2, 2012 - link
I think you just described blade servers...Lonyo - Wednesday, May 2, 2012 - link
In the words of South Park:VIA already did it.
Now Intel just need to catch up and go for the PicoITX form factor, 7.2cm x 10cm
http://www.viaembedded.com/en/products/boards/prod...
There's also NanoITX at 12cm x 12cm
http://www.viaembedded.com/en/products/boards/prod...
Nice that Intel have decided to give us higher performance in these form factors, although for digital signage I'm not sure how necessary such performance is. It's just a shame it's taken them something like 5 or more years to get there.
plonk420 - Wednesday, May 2, 2012 - link
obviously, via is known for their Intel-like CPU performance, as well >_>StevoLincolnite - Friday, May 4, 2012 - link
The Via Nano's single threaded performance is higher than Atom usually, which is what Via targets the chips at.JKflipflop98 - Monday, May 7, 2012 - link
. . . and an i5 (like in this computer) will destroy a Nano in performance.StevoLincolnite - Monday, May 7, 2012 - link
Obviously. Hence why I said that's why Via targets the Nano at the Atom.Justturn - Thursday, May 24, 2012 - link
:)mulberry bag : http://www.bagsmulberryoutlet.com
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Taft12 - Wednesday, May 2, 2012 - link
"The form factor carries the name Next Unit of Computing, or simply NUC"Great idea, but the obnoxious name has me rooting for its failure.
ravisurdhar - Wednesday, May 2, 2012 - link
I think the motherboard on my Asus Eee Slate (SB i5, 4GB DDR3, 60GB mSATA SSD) isn't too much bigger than that.You know what this would be perfect for? More pen-enabled tablets that run windows!
eaanders22 - Wednesday, May 2, 2012 - link
It looks like a handy gadget to carry around on trips for presentations that require full PC horsepower. Plug it into the HDMI on any big screen and control it with a phone using Bluetooth or WiFi.Magichands8 - Wednesday, May 2, 2012 - link
"...plus OEMs can always do their own designs—so it's hard to specule at this point."I agree. It's very hard for me to specule too. What I wish we could get is a fundamental redesign of how the components on a board are laid out and how the MB is designed to make it as compact as possible. Kind of like what Silverstone did for the computer case with the FT03 (although I think it was still quite flawed). Yes, there are ultrabooks available but I want something that enables full access to the highest performance parts and that's designed around maximum cooling efficiency. Something like a modular system block that can incorporate all of the necessities of a top of the line system that's abstracted from a separate storage subsystem. They could even incorporate a hot-pluggable msata SSD drive as a system drive. They should stop aiming for some tiny niche market and design such a system with broader flexibility in mind.
jamyryals - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
Flexibility is a niche.tipoo - Wednesday, May 2, 2012 - link
1. Take laptop form factor motherboard2. Remove laptop
3. Sell it for higher margins than higher powered desktops?
Denithor - Wednesday, May 2, 2012 - link
+1yyrkoon - Wednesday, May 2, 2012 - link
Step 2 should be reduce package size. Since laptop motherboards are typically a good bit bigger.Point taken though.
Samus - Wednesday, May 2, 2012 - link
How am I going to plug my GTX680 into that!? :)The noob - Wednesday, May 9, 2012 - link
Since GTX 680 is a "card", I will ask nvidia to built one as thin as credit card so you can plug it into a nuc. . How well is this?snoozemode - Wednesday, May 2, 2012 - link
Perhaps they should start making real SoCs as well, integrated USB, SATA, WiFi etc.Kristian Vättö - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
That's what Haswell will bring :-)tipoo - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
Always something better coming if you wait, hrmph :PBut then again, this is the first time I remember being perfectly happy with the performance of a three year old machine (Penryn quad).
yyrkoon - Wednesday, May 2, 2012 - link
Maybe this is how Intel is going to compete with ARM in the embedded field ? ATOM the way it stands, in my mind is no competition. By far.In the low power market it would not work very well. But I could see it being handy in a few cases. Among those that were already mentioned in the article.
A likely find in the wild would be something like this, a copy of Windows embedded, on POS systems country wide ( U. S. ) Another could be a customized board with improved graphics to make a decent gaming console.
For me personally. We're 100% off-grid. Our power is provided by solar / wind. Plus the once a week use of a 30kW generator to pump water into a holding tank. Anyway, a small low-enough power system like this would come in very handy around here. For us, that has been our holy grail lately. A system that draws minimal power, but provides enough horsepower to not feel like an under-performing laptop. 50-60WH range would be incredibly nice Including monitor. Well that, and in a reasonable price range.
Maybe, though, I am just dreaming. But I do know we have the ability / technology to do so. It just seems that ODM's/OEM's just want to make products that use more, and more power.
It will be interesting to see where this sort of thing leads us.
Iketh - Wednesday, May 2, 2012 - link
so, where do you live?gcor - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
Why not use laptops?We travelled in the Australian outback for a year witha camper trailer. It has 120W solar panels and a 120Ah 12v AGM deep cycle battery for all our power (except for occasional stops in caravan parks).
For compute, we brought a couple of 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo laptops and 12v DC chargers to avoid 240v inverter inefficiencies. Also, we removed the laptop batteries, as charging a battery off a battery is very inefficient. Each laptop pulled from the deep cycle battery about 1.8-2.5 amps (i.e. 22-30 watts). We used to mess around with holiday pics, email, skype, watch TV/movies quite a lot and managed fine with these. Only time we had to be careful with power was when we set up the camper trailer under trees.
These laptops are feeling a bit slow now, but I would assume current models would be faster and would draw about the same.
yyrkoon - Friday, May 4, 2012 - link
Well, we're a bit less spartan here. Our panels yield about 2.5kW total peak. !kW worth pump two gallons water per minute from 500 feet down. The rest charge the battery bank. Our battery bank is 2250AH, flooded lead acid L16 2v batteries run in series to 12V out to a salvaged ambulance 2500W inverter.For wind, we use two Southwest windpower AIR-X 400W turbines. Being at 5900 feet, we get plenty of wind a lot of the time. Anything bigger would be asking for trouble ( the wind here has a habit of destroying wind turbines ).
We run laptops now. For the most part, they are "O K". For gaming they're not so great. For encoding media they're terrible. Myself I run an AMD based laptop that can play GTA IV fairly well I suppose. While encoding movies really is not that good. Despite the fact it is a quad core system. The lower frequency ( 1.4Ghz ) just does not cut it for some things.
So enough history. My personal reasons for not wanting to use laptops are many fold.
First expand-ability Though with these as is, not much room other than what you can do with a laptop already.
Second, customization. Laptops have a habit of heating up because of the confined space in which they reside ( internals ). With something like this, I could make a custom case, with near silent cooling. Passed that, I could add multiple drives, without breaking the bank on some high end business / entertainment model laptop With laptops, you're far more restricted in what you can do as far as customization goes in general. You're also restricted in what you can buy, from sellers / manufacturers.
Lastly, I could go on for days, but obviously I wont. We do not need laptops here. They only serve as desktop replacements. Then not even very well at that. Something like this might work, while it also may not. Ivy Bridge is looking very attractive as far as low power goes, and perhaps the next tick will bring us something even better.
Either way, I like what I am seeing here we'll just have to see where it leads.
To the other person who asked where I live - Arizona.
gcor - Friday, May 4, 2012 - link
I think you have a very good idea about what you'd like to do with the machines. I wouldn't go that route myself anymore, as I'm no longer a practising enthusiast as it were.Around 2009 I gave up on customisation, building machines from parts and niche products. Unfortunately my experience over a decade or so was that OS and other software patches would eventually kill the machine, leading to many frustrating hours of working out how to get around it. Eventually I got the feeling that no matter how fast my custom set ups were, downtime of days / weeks negated any speed gains.
With the arrival of kids I became horribly time poor, so stability became the most important aspect of machines for me. I just wanted machines that wouldn't require huge time investment to keep alive. Name brand laptops have fit this very well. So far (touch wood and all that) I'm getting the reliability I need, however, games performance is out the window, as is encoding.
yyrkoon - Friday, May 4, 2012 - link
I agree that stability is paramount, With that said, I am not sure what that has to do with customization really. It does mean you have to research the hardware you want to use before buying. Which is what I have always considered ( for the last 5 + years anyhow ) the most important part of the build process. That in of it's self can be time consuming I agree.When it is all said then done however. You usually ( always ? ) end up with a system to be perfectly happy with. My last system build was exactly that. Perfect. While it was custom, it was nothing like this.
Using a system board like this for me would entail making my own case from scratch. Something I would actually enjoy, but have not yet done to date. In this *case*, that would be the majority of the customization for me. Building my own case, with my idea of perfection in mind. Having had what I consider some really cool ideas for a case design for several years now, I would really like to give it a shot.
With all that said. I have actually considered ripping my laptop apart and building a case around that. But at some point, you have to ask yourself "why". Resale would be non-existent, and you never know how well it would work out in the end. The one reason why i would do this is so that I could overclock the system to have it perform reasonably well.Then enclose it in a case with ample cooling to help keep it happy. Stability then becomes a concern . . . and yeah it is too much trouble to deal with really.
Do I *need* this board to do what I want ? Not really. Would I like this board to work out for my own purposes ? Definitely.
gcor - Friday, May 4, 2012 - link
Things may well have got better since my days of system building.Some of the trouble I had was with buggy motherboard firmware. By the time I had evidence of the problems, the motherboard manufacturer had stopped doing fixes. I eventually stuck to more common big name enthusiast motherboards, which definitely helped.
However, the problem then moved on to integration problems between add on boards. If all the gear was relatively new, things worked fine at first, but as patches came out over the months / years, problems would then appear. Working out which patches to exclude became a long and tedious process. Also, not being able to install important updates like service packs meant the systems either lacked functionality or security.
So, while I found I could research and put together a pretty fast and stable system using big name brands that worked for a while, I'd eventually wind up with trouble. On average this generally started about 18 months in.
At the same time, the big name PC's and laptops at work kept on keeping on. I looked into it and found out that with big name systems that were still in original configuration, there was much better testing by MS etc before release. Also, if a problem did occur in the field, big corporates with loads of these systems would push back the problems on to the vendors and a fix would be released.
Looking at it from a testing perspective, it's impossible for vendors to test all permutations and combinations of kit out there. I did this kind of thing myself when working on closed-system telecom's network nodes. We restricted and had control of every revision of hardware, firmware, OS and application. In order to ensure that every customer system in the field was tested, the number of system configurations rapidly exploded. We did the testing, but it was extremely expensive. To my mind, there is absolutely no way vendors in PC open systems land can come close to this.
Anyway, I'm clearly a little jaded on systems building these days. It used to be a great fun hobby, but the down time when I actually needed to get stuff done killed it for me.
yyrkoon - Friday, May 4, 2012 - link
Not jaded at all. In my world, you pay for something, you need to get a quality product. At least where functionality comes into play. You might not get every bell and whistle, but it should work well for at least 3 years. 5 years + was the norm in the 90's.For what its worth, I've been building systems since 93, and yes now days everyone seems to be shoveling crap out the door. Call it a sign of the times.
gcor - Saturday, May 5, 2012 - link
I tend to agree with the sign of the times sentiment.I gave up on Telecom's network R&D in 2007 when my last assignment was to ensure we met uptime contractual agreements, not by fixing the crashes caused by traffic (i.e. phone calls), but by reducing reboot times. It took 40 people 18 months to engineer a new go-faster distributed boot sequence that was much more prone to race condition failures and much harder to maintain, instead of fixing the root cause.
Of course, 18 months later the network traffic had increased to the extent that the improved boot times had not changed the overall annual uptime figures. I.e., 60 man years of work achieved something that was worse than useless.
I chucked the towel in when our design centre was finally asked to look into and fix the root causes of the crashes, but told we only had weeks to do it in.
hoeding - Thursday, May 3, 2012 - link
Hopefully these support iSCSI booting, they will be great for HTPC and smart tv type stuff.PyroHoltz - Friday, May 4, 2012 - link
Where is the Ethernet port....for shame if they think that should be dongled off of the USB3.0 port.Black1969ta - Saturday, May 5, 2012 - link
With that Acronym for a name, I can picture the ad campaign now,Launch will coincide with "The Three Stooges (II)" whatever the title will be.
The Stooges and Intel will pair up to promote the NUC and the movie.
Maybe market it at Children to get a computor in the Toddler's room
The stooges slapstick comedy will involve the NUC bashing around and still working to demonstrate toughness,
Moe already says NUC, NUC, NUC. so it is a perfect fit.
Selling them toward the untouched market of Pre-preschool would sell Millions, like that, " Your child can read" program.
scrapeboxmurah - Tuesday, August 7, 2012 - link
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