I think this will come in the form of an LCD on flexible fabric in a few years. You'll roll it up into a tube and take it with you in your messenger bag.
Great concept. I really like the idea of owning cheap computing devices. That way, if I break it I won't feel bad. Nothing feels worse than accidentally spilling water all over your expensive laptop. It would fit me just perfectly.
Given Intel/Windows tablets cost less than $100 in stores today, there's no reason to think similar hardware minus the touchscreen will cost much more.
Intel is selling Bay Trail CPUs for $5. Microsoft is selling Windows 8.1 licenses for low-end devices at $15. Given an Android tablet with all the rest (wireless/storage) can be had for $40, sub-$100 Intel/Windows PCs became feasible.
I know a tv can send back commands from e.g. the remote control over HDMI, it really is bidirectional communication, but I wouldn't know whether it's good enough for something like touchscreen.
Well you can do 100Mbps Ethernet over HDMI 1.4 with a compatible cable, so I don't see why it would be technically impossible. The question is, can this stick do it?
No. Touch screen monitors with HDMI need another channel, usually a USB port, to send touch events. In theory, I guess you could send events over DDC, but then you're gonna have to get video driver makers involved, make sure that the spec you choose doesn't cause existing drivers to puke, etc.
It doesn't seem like it's really competing with the Chromecast. My impression was that the Compute Stick can actually run software by itself, not requiring a connection to another device.
Yup. If any of this class of product were any good, we'd be using them right now. And even if Intel produced the best of breed, how much computing power can be wringed out of the power supplied by USB (say 10W max, which is generous)? Not much.
Haters gonna hate. Microsoft, Intel, Google - these brands are never cool for some ungrateful as where we are today is in big part thanks to those three.
Honestly, I'd rather see that instead of the current version which is "Give us your email, and then spam all your contacts, and maybe we'll bump you up on the exclusive early beta list".
Half of these companies think they're launching a cure for cancer delivered via an exclusive nightclub with the "beta signups".
TBH, early adopters have no problem giving their email for these kind of stuff. Even weirder is your conclusion that if you give someone your email he can spam your contacts, which he obviously can't.
He meant sites offering you a free product or a months worth of credit for sending a message to X of your friends if they sign up as well (and if they're smart they get your friends email addresses like that even if they don't sign up)
I just wish there was a standard through which one could contact a server on a regular basis and ask for a well formatted list of updates from a logical channel. I think I would call it Atom ... no, that's too common of a name. I would call it really simple syndication. That's a much catchier name.
I wonder if anyone could use a standard like that, if such a thing existing and worked really well with a boatload of software.
Or, like one of the child comments said: send me an email. I'm not yet to the point of adding calendar entries to "check back soon" for a website.
As the power increases beyond Atom processors, I think this will be very compelling.
I'd love to be able to unplug a dongle from my desktop monitor at home, and plug it into a tablet sized device to use on the train, then plug it into my monitor when I get to work, or a hotel rooms tv screen, or the presentation screen in our office conference room, etc. etc.
I'm not clear how these work: is the idea that each device (desktop, tablet, etc) has a CPU and this is an additional CPU, so you're basically carting around your own VM and the host equipment can let you play in it's garden or not, complete with network access?
Why is it that I don't see many corporate IT departments adopting this?
It's a full, separate system on a USB stick. This means it will need to patched and maintained, and that apps and dats will still need the usual back-and-forth sync of multiple systems.
Yes, phone would be ideal, but I think we're seeing that a phone OS is usually quite stripped down vs a desktop.
Though I haven't tried the Ubuntu Touch stuff, so maybe that is the right solution.
Pluging an HDMI or USB dongle into a display is pretty simple, I suspect pairing with your phone would be more difficult, or would require cables and such.
"TV sticks" of this form factor have been all the rage on AliExpress, DealExtreme, and the like, although their popularity seems to have waned somewhat compared set-top-boxes (I read somewhere that it was due to trouble managing heat while customers demanded more powerful processors, but I don't know). See http://www.google.com/cse?q=tv+stick&sa=&cx=partner-pub-8120... and http://liliputing.com/?s=tv+stick
The sad thing to me is that none of them are even remotely innovative.
The NUC is just a small form factor PC, exceptionally well executed but nothing new.
Galileo is a Raspberry Pi
Edison is an Arduino (sort of)
Compute Stick is a Fire TV/Android Stick
None of these could be really considered booming markets. ARM is eating Intel's lunch in the mobile market and Intel is shooting for the products that are least likely to turn a profit. If they could get a viable x86 phone on the market (or start making ARM processors) I think they'd be in much better shape.
I'm not really concerned about whether Linux will run 'fine' on less hardware, I'd just want to be able to purchase the higher-end (hardware-wise) version.
I'm not going to buy the high-end version if it requires me to buy the prepackaged Windows license however.
Yeah, its strange that the OS is preinstalled, whereas with the Intel NUC I believe it comes without an OS and you need to do the setup yourself, which is preferable.
Windows will run amazing on these and all things considered storage isn't an issue. They have really optimized for ultra small devices and id be willing to bet windows 8.1 on these would be super awesome actually. My daughters tablet with similar specs but only 1gb of ram is smooth as can be.
How much engineering effort is spent on optimization and improving performance, as opposed to changing the look'n'feel and adding consumer-focused features?
Apple works hard on power efficiency. You don't get high battery life for free. Memory usage may get less attention, but, for example, they do 'swap' to memory by compressing pages (does it help? I wouldn't know. Read http://dfrws.org/2014/proceedings/DFRWS2014-1.pdf)
Edit: oops. That paper isn't evaluating performance, as I thought it would.
Looking at the ubuntu system requirements page, they say: "From experience, we all know that it is recommended to have 2048 MiB RAM to properly run a day to day Ubuntu." .
Of course you can run something else, but for a hassle free experience , ubuntu seems like the best choice.
With Unity you certainly need more RAM but nothing prevents one from installing another wm like xfce, awesome or lxde to save a ton on RAM and run just fine on 1 Gb.
Yup. Seems like pointless, instant-gratification consumerism when server boxes are far faster, cheaper and greener. Worse, it's an un-upgradable device to buy and throw away. Anyone that needs more horsepower, it's far simpler to either trade up, use a real server or just use a cloud/VPS similar to AWS.
It's been too long since I built a PC so I'll take your word on the faster/cheaper argument, but greener? Can you really build a server box that uses less power than a 1-2A USB device?
>Can you really build a server box that uses less power than a 1-2A USB device?
Not sure, but I think the point was that its "greener" because you can swap out individual parts over time using the same case and ultimately producing less waste. You may also argue that individual components are easier to recycle.
At scale, compute boxes are rarely upgraded because it's TCO cheaper to invest in newer systems (or CPU, mb, RAM). IOW, it's cheaper to wait and refresh everything, that is unless you're adding RAM, CPUs or disks.
If form factors don't change, reusing the mounting hw, PSUs and enclosures can be doable. Some web shops wait until boxes die entirely before replacement while IT shops lifecycle out all gear (usually everything but racks) in 4-6 years.
These hotdog USB sticks aren't upgradable at all and they're limited to the processing power of 5-10W.
"server boxes are far faster, cheaper and greener. Worse, it's an un-upgradable device to buy and throw away."
How many of these devices would you have to buy and throw away to match the environmental material footprint of even one 1U rack-mount server? They're tiny. Orders of magnitude matter.
(Similar effect: However "disposable" USB flash drives may superficially seem, compared to the floppies they replaced they are nothing. And I do not just mean that the USB sticks can hold lots of stuff... I mean that if you pile a normal computer user of the 2015 era's USB sticks in one pile, and a normal computer user of the 1990 era's floppy disks into another pile, the floppies would tower over the entire pile of USB drives and almost certainly have a much larger environmental footprint. I hedge only for the possibility that the nasty flash memory might dominate the floppies manufacturing, but the floppies do irreducibly have an awful lot more plastic in them, so I'm still guessing the floppy pile comfortably "wins".)
How many of these sticks, powered hubs and controlling computers would you have to buy to equal one green 1U server? On the order of 64 USB sticks, 15 powered hubs AND one computer... That's 15 cheap bricks and a computer's power supply that have to be made and suck down power versus a quality, high-efficiency switching PSU that is about ~98% efficient. Doing the math on the supply chain sourcing of each component is pointless, because it wouldn't be practical, and at present, it's impossible to source all materials from goods to actual, verified origin (not shady middlemen).
Also, how much power would be lost by all those cheap bricks compared to a single, efficient switching power supply?
It also would be 65 systems to maintain.
Renting a fraction (via cloud/VPS) of a green server (good PUE DCs and LP gear) is far cheaper and greener. But more importantly, waste fewer computing resources.
How does a cloud VM satisfy the 'intel stick' use-case? Where is the HDMI port?
Also, since you're piling on every possible thing you can to make your case, you should also include the power systems of every networking device between your cloud VM and you.
Floppies are plastic and vinyl. Flash drives require an entire foundry worth of heavy metals and exotic compounds. I doubt it is the clear win you think.
The drive needs electronics as well, consuming possibly as much of heavy metals and exotic compounds. And you need a lot of floppies to be on par with capacity of a flash drive.
Reminds me of the tail end of netbooks. After MS had resuscitated XP via a restrictive OEM license, and Intel had cooked up the first gen or so of Atom...
I'll happily buy the higher-end version and handle the Linux install myself, as long as I can remove the Windows license and get a subsequent refund from Microsoft.
But if thats not possible then I'll just wait until some other manufacturer makes a bad-ass Linux version for the same price, or less ..
With all likelyhood it comes with "Windows 8.1 with Bing", which means Intel will have paid 0$ to put it on there. There is no refund to get, and the extra cost is supposed to be justified by the extra ram and storage space.
It has USB and microSD slots. This device is clearly not intended for serious computing, but it is more like a general purpose media device. Like a Chromecast/FireTV that is 100% customizable.
Could we see people move from a phone to carrying two devices? One which is quite personal (phone, social, camera, etc) and one which is a little more generic (general computing device). I'm thinking about how most people would be reluctant to let their phone out of their sight, while they could also use a general stick that allowed tasks, work, etc.
I usually have my phone in my pocket, and my Moto360 watch on my wrist. Two devices. I used to be really reluctant to let my phone out of sight but since getting the smart watch, I no longer mind because it does an absolute fantastic job at notifying me of emails, texts, and other alerts. No longer do I have to pull out my phone to check stuff etc.
I may be in the minority but it's definitely changed my habits. I feel as if it's "easier" for some reason.
The one system image idea is the next logical progression of N screens. The engineering issue is providing enough cooling to a laptop+phone when being used as a desktop/laptop... The entire dock would have to be a heatsink for folks that want to play their 3d games.
I seriously couldn't decide if the copywriter was laughing when he or she wrote "The Intel Compute Stick is a new generation compute-on-a-stick device." (Because x-on-a-stick is an inherently funny phrasing.) But I read the text very carefully and concluded that it was written earnestly, so I didn't leave a comment.
It really is a new generation of compute-on-a-stick device.
The NUC has different niches than what this is going for. The NUC line at the low end will probably be pushed out by this, but a lot of NUCs are sold with things like PCIe ports and the like that this thing almost certainly won't have. The low end has a lot of differentiation, especially in boutique devices where you just need a processor, and some kind of output.
Hardware like that makes me yearn for one with no wireless and a pair of Gigabit Ethernet ports to use as a firewall and server.
It's fairly interesting to note what it's not: Android or Chrome OS. I suspect Microsoft will do quite well out of this, especially in the digital signage market, anywhere which is reasonably price sensitive but if developer time and cost can be reduced then they get a lot of leeway.
Still, yet another reminder that the cost of computing is collapsing. Most of the cost here is Intel margin and in the case of the more expensive one MS licenses.
Not sure it applies to this, since it doesn't have a screen. Windows is used in a lot of embedded applications, and I think we still charge for that (disclaimer: unknowledgeable Microsoft employee).
They'll go great lengths to prevent Linux from getting any more exposure than Windows on any format. A zero or negative-cost license is to be expected.
You'd think not because desktop PCs, ultra compact PCs (NUC, Brix) by definition don't come with a screen either - screens are add ons. I think the 9" rule basically applied to mobile devices only, i.e. tablets and smartphones.
> Hardware like that makes me yearn for one with no wireless and a pair of Gigabit Ethernet ports to use as a firewall and server.
Unfortunately, general purpose hardware and operating system needs a fair amount of juice to route and inspect 1gbps of traffic.
Best performance per watt I've found is the Edgerouter Lite but that has dedicated routing acceleration hardware to achieve what it does with the little mips processor it has.
Closest you'll find is Soekris, ALIX or APU for a routing platform. A Beaglebone black makes a nice little box for lightweight serving on its own.
There are ARM CPUs available that do network forwarding in hardware. Some even support iptables rules.
I would be very surprised if a quad-core current-gen Atom could not do that in software, though. I could route 300Mbps through OpenBSD's pf on an AMD Geode.
There's a lot out there that can do NAT and some firewalling in software at large fractions of a gigabit/s for pretty cheap. But if you throw in QoS and queue management the CPU requirements get very high by the standards of MIPS and embedded x86. And unfortunately, none of the network acceleration hardware you'll find on any of those SoCs has anything like a hardware implementation of fq_codel or even RED.
The CeroWRT project has been searching for more than a year for a new generation of hardware to use as the platform for their development of better router software. There's nothing affordable that can keep up with the really fast DOCSIS connections available while doing anything intelligent on a per-packet basis.
How about running the packet filter in a dual-NIC VM on a VT-d capable PC? Dell T20 has Xeon E3 for $500 with 1TB disk and 4GB RAM. Add a PCI NIC for firewall purposes and still have the rest of the PC for use to run other VMs. GPU can be passed through to another VM.
Yeah, using desktop-class hardware works almost effortlessly, but it's not really a good substitute for a $120 router that gets by with passive cooling. This discussion is about whole computers that could hide inside the power supply for that server and run off its standby power rail.
If you're going to be running a server 24/7 anyways, it makes sense to equip it to also be your firewall and gateway. But that doesn't eliminate the huge gap between such a machine and off-the-shelf consumer networking equipment.
It may become easier for consumers to buy a general-purpose PC once and change software as needed, rather than chasing the ever moving ceiling of low-end disposable hardware.
I've lost track of the number of cheap special-purpose appliances I've bought, which turned out to have limitations not present in a general-purpose PC. Consumer routers and NAS devices are already in this category, soon to be joined by compute sticks.
The problem is that buyers rarely know which part of the long tail they may need later. As Intel motherboards converge into a SoC and peripherals support USB3.1+, hopefully we end up with a future that looks like Google's Project Ara, i.e. small modules.
L7 SPI is expensive whereas simple routing of 1 Gbps usually demands only a single core and 64-128 MiB of RAM. Large production shops have such FE load balancer / router boxes in HA mode (ie CARP) that barely break a sweat.
+1 for the ERLite; it's a MIPS62r2 Cavium Octeon with 512MB RAM[1]. With the latest firmware, it's running Debian Wheezy, and I've had no trouble with adding the normal Debian repos and adding things like Privoxy to it (though I suspect these would be overwritten in a FW update). With Privoxy loaded and being used as an HTTP proxy for my local net with the EasyList rules, it doesn't break about 5%CPU with 100mbit/sec of inbound traffic and some web browsing going through it (I'm running NAT as well).
Being honest, it's a bit hacky for consumers...you'd be good to know Vyatta (what it uses under the hood) to get the most out of it, since there are still some things the web UI can't do (L2TP VPN being one, or PPTP without a Radius server for auth). However, it's a heck of a lot cheaper, smaller, and more power efficient than my previous P4 box running pfSense with Intel Pro/1000GTs, so I'm pretty happy with it.
I do think it'd be super awesome if Ubiquiti released a pfSense or m0n0wall-based EdgeRouter with the same hardware acceleration...I'd gladly pay $200 or so for that, but the ERLite is damn hard to beat for $100.
I have a vague memory that FreeBSD does ship with the binary blobs for the acceleration, so pfsense might be doable. I did install FreeBSD on mine for a while, but you need some external setup to build packages as there isnt enough storage for the ports tree and no mips binary packages.
Check out the Intel Atom Avoton and Rangley SOCs. Nice x86 cores, ECC, crypto acceleration, VT-x, passive TDP, and 4x 1/2.5gbe or 1x 10gbe depending on the serdes. I only wish they had VT-d to get sr iov. If you really need more connectivity going the trident + Intel + cumulus white box switch rate has crazy throughput per watt.
Sure. By "trident" I really mean any merchant silicon switching platform. The Broadcom Trident ASIC/chipset really kicked this market segment off in 2011/2012ish. I mentioned it specifically as products like the Juniper QFX3500 series really opened up the door for things like fat/high radix clos networks that we're seeing in production.
From memory the Trident boxes supported 640gbs of throughput on SFP+ or QSFP ports, about 10,000 prefixes/routes, a couple thousand ACL terms, 1 or 2u, and around 200watts. They cost maybe $20,000 at launch are down to $5-10,000 now depending on volume and vendor. That's great for a TOR or agg switch if you can manage the individual devices (as opposed to a switch chassis like a nexus 7K).
The other thing those really opened up is cheap as chips edge devices. 10,000 routes isnt a lot, but it works if you have limited peers or can do summarization off device like a route reflector. These chipsets, and trident in particular, also work great with things like OpenFlow as you move that expensive route computation off device to a specialized platform.
The trident platform is basically EOL'd, everyones moved on to Trident II for the most part. Trident II is like 100,000 prefixes, 50,000 ACLs, 1 or 2u, 200 to 400 watts, 1.2TBs of forwarding, and SFP+/QSFP ports. Price is $15-25,000 depending on volume and vendor etc. Pushing 640gbs of throughput for ~$20,000 is pretty crazy. It means I could build a single 10kVa server rack that pushes a legit 1tbs of traffic to the internets for about $200,000. Totally insane to think about compared to just a few years ago.
The next big change should be moving from 10/40 serdes to 25/100 in the next year or so. The Broadcom Tomahawk should be like 3tbs in 2u and a couple hundred watts for comparable prices. If you need to convert between 10/40 and 25/100 ("gearbox") cost and complexity will go up a bit.
edit: and to clarify these platforms usually use Intel CPUs to run the OS/route engines. The OS/RE/HAL, like cumulus provides, is then responsible for pushing updates down to the switching asic.
Hard to say. Intel has taken a loss on their mobile division lately [1], and I'm assuming this is a mobile-class processor. ARM has had them spooked, enough to make a major shift into mobile-first development and offering heavy discounts (or perhaps even selling at cost or at a loss) on mobile hardware.
> Hardware like that makes me yearn for one with no wireless and a pair of Gigabit Ethernet ports to use as a firewall and server.
Yeah, me too.. I currently use a fan-less Via board with integrated 686 compatible CPU. It's been great, but it's now 7 (?) years old so it might be time for an upgrade. Wonder if they still make them, they never got the attention they deserved.
Mine has this processor - It's not Intel or AMD, but "Pentium compatible" :)
cpu0: VIA Esther processor 1000MHz ("CentaurHauls" 686-class) 1 GHz
Edit 2:
Seems like these haven't matured a lot, and are expensive and hard to come by compared to other mini-itx boards. Do like the fanless, integrated processor on mine though, and that the power consumption is really low.
Consider the use case suggested by the image on the copy i.e; on-screen projection of slides in a business meeting. Can this use case be met with a tablet/smart phone using a VGA adapter?
The "business meeting" use case pictured doesn't make a lot of sense. The copy at the bottom says the stick itself is a computer, not a video receiver, so there'd have to be a keyboard/mouse/controller of some kind connected to it, and they'd have to get the slide deck onto it somehow, and open PowerPoint, and that just doesn't seem particularly useful. It's much easier to use some wireless display technology and cast it from a laptop, or plug in a cable.
What they say they're aiming for are simple, self-contained (display-only?) kiosks... which maybe could be useful, for some people. You could also use it as a media center. If it could magically transform a huge TV into a touch screen, on the other hand... that would be amazing.
It supports Bluetooth, so you could pair a remote or a smartphone with it, and it's easier to carry than a laptop. Remember there's a full version of MS Office on it, too.
What makes more sense to me, though, would be a phone with an HDMI port (or wireless video capability) that connects directly to the projector. It's one less device to carry. If you don't want to walk over to the phone to advance to the next slide, you could still add a Bluetooth remote or control it from one of those smart watches.
(I'm kind of suprised that Blackberry never tried something like what I just described--it would have been a great way to differentiate themselves in the enterprise sector and keep the iPhone at bay.)
Some phones tried the HDMI out (I bought my Droid Razr because of it), but I guess market research has shown that people don't really care. Most phones (including the iPhone) still support the HDMI out over USB in some form, and still next to nobody uses it.
> I'm kind of suprised that Blackberry never tried
The BlackBerry Z10 I have in some drawer at home has a micro HDMI out. Also BB OS 10 can act as an UPnP server and a Samba share, and I think it supports Miracast or something.
I've done this before. I had a micro-HDMI to HDMI connector, and a HDMI to DVI connector to plug the phone into the projector. This was about 2 years ago, and I was using a 2 year old phone, IIRC. The experience sucked, but mostly because the app I was using didn't support most PowerPoint features.
I'm sure modern phones and apps could handle it pretty well, though. Using the official MS Office apps would probably solve the major issues I had.
My 2c ... I see a problem with it not being able to fit into the HDMI ports on my TV ... due to the design of the TV there is only room for a compact HDMI cable (the port is located in a small recessed section). In this case I'd need to connect it with an HDMI extension cable, and would end up having to mount the dongle itself somewhere.
Its probably better to buy an ultra compact PC such as an Intel NUC or Gigabyte Brix, which come with VESA mounts for mounting onto the back of the TV, and store data on an SSD drive.
NUC and Brix are also more powerful. I could almost see myself carrying one of these around like I used to carry around a USB memory stick. Plug it into any monitor or TV and I've got a computer. Not sure what I would do about mouse a keyboard, though.
Having public places like schools, libraries and even the local Starbucks just have a stack of Bluetooth peripherals and screens whilst you carry your own computer in your pocket would suit so many people.
Laptops are great but clunky and not really solving the issue of computing without lugging it around. Tablets are great but are exceeding difficult to work on at the moment.
Tablets are great but are exceeding difficult to work on at the moment.
How so? Something like a Surface seems fine if you need a tablet for work.
I think the peripherals dock would be a decent solution for certain environments (schools, libraries, maybe hospitals, military bases, cruise ships, and such), but relying on public places to have well-kept and generally available peripherals would be folly.
Articles online say this will ship with an HDMI extender, which is pretty standard, honestly. Every one of these HDMI dongle computers I've bought like Chromecast came with one.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 281 ms ] threadhttp://www.projectorcentral.com/popular-pocket-projectors.ht...
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/221639054114?_trksid=p2059210.m274...
See http://lowendtalk.com/discussion/39399/meegopad-t01
There are various comm protocols
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDMI#Communication_channel_pro...
(This product line is DOA.)
Would've been nice to have a bit of actual information.
Half of these companies think they're launching a cure for cancer delivered via an exclusive nightclub with the "beta signups".
I wonder if anyone could use a standard like that, if such a thing existing and worked really well with a boatload of software.
Or, like one of the child comments said: send me an email. I'm not yet to the point of adding calendar entries to "check back soon" for a website.
There is another, less-PC, name for a bundle of sticks but I don't think they would go that way.
Also, you'll need to setup a cloud cluster... A nontrivial task.
I have a feeling this could be a game changer.
I'm more than impressed... I'm stunned.
Linux version for $90? I can get a bucket (3 probably) ARM Android ones for that price.
I'd love to be able to unplug a dongle from my desktop monitor at home, and plug it into a tablet sized device to use on the train, then plug it into my monitor when I get to work, or a hotel rooms tv screen, or the presentation screen in our office conference room, etc. etc.
Why is it that I don't see many corporate IT departments adopting this?
http://www.phonearena.com/reviews/Motorola-ATRIX-4G-Laptop-D...
Though I haven't tried the Ubuntu Touch stuff, so maybe that is the right solution.
Pluging an HDMI or USB dongle into a display is pretty simple, I suspect pairing with your phone would be more difficult, or would require cables and such.
They've mostly run on ARM and Android, with some hobbyists loading more traditional Linux distros on. Probably the most notable exception that I know of is the following: http://liliputing.com/2014/12/100-bay-trail-pc-stick-can-run...
If this is priced well it will be interesting to see how it impacts that landscape.
The NUC is just a small form factor PC, exceptionally well executed but nothing new.
Galileo is a Raspberry Pi
Edison is an Arduino (sort of)
Compute Stick is a Fire TV/Android Stick
None of these could be really considered booming markets. ARM is eating Intel's lunch in the mobile market and Intel is shooting for the products that are least likely to turn a profit. If they could get a viable x86 phone on the market (or start making ARM processors) I think they'd be in much better shape.
via: http://techreport.com/news/27619/intel-compute-stick-is-a-14...
I wish that Chromecast and Apple TV supported an open standard for streaming rather than everyone using their own proprietary standards.
I think I might pass on this.
I'm not going to buy the high-end version if it requires me to buy the prepackaged Windows license however.
How much memory does Mac OS X Yosemite need?
How much engineering effort is spent on optimization and improving performance, as opposed to changing the look'n'feel and adding consumer-focused features?
Edit: oops. That paper isn't evaluating performance, as I thought it would.
Of course you can run something else, but for a hassle free experience , ubuntu seems like the best choice.
Not sure, but I think the point was that its "greener" because you can swap out individual parts over time using the same case and ultimately producing less waste. You may also argue that individual components are easier to recycle.
If form factors don't change, reusing the mounting hw, PSUs and enclosures can be doable. Some web shops wait until boxes die entirely before replacement while IT shops lifecycle out all gear (usually everything but racks) in 4-6 years.
These hotdog USB sticks aren't upgradable at all and they're limited to the processing power of 5-10W.
How many of these devices would you have to buy and throw away to match the environmental material footprint of even one 1U rack-mount server? They're tiny. Orders of magnitude matter.
(Similar effect: However "disposable" USB flash drives may superficially seem, compared to the floppies they replaced they are nothing. And I do not just mean that the USB sticks can hold lots of stuff... I mean that if you pile a normal computer user of the 2015 era's USB sticks in one pile, and a normal computer user of the 1990 era's floppy disks into another pile, the floppies would tower over the entire pile of USB drives and almost certainly have a much larger environmental footprint. I hedge only for the possibility that the nasty flash memory might dominate the floppies manufacturing, but the floppies do irreducibly have an awful lot more plastic in them, so I'm still guessing the floppy pile comfortably "wins".)
Also, how much power would be lost by all those cheap bricks compared to a single, efficient switching power supply?
It also would be 65 systems to maintain.
Renting a fraction (via cloud/VPS) of a green server (good PUE DCs and LP gear) is far cheaper and greener. But more importantly, waste fewer computing resources.
Also, since you're piling on every possible thing you can to make your case, you should also include the power systems of every networking device between your cloud VM and you.
But if thats not possible then I'll just wait until some other manufacturer makes a bad-ass Linux version for the same price, or less ..
I think the future is our compute power in our "phones" that work with ambient peripherals (keyboards, monitors).
http://www.redmondpie.com/how-to-set-up-the-galaxy-nexus-as-...
I may be in the minority but it's definitely changed my habits. I feel as if it's "easier" for some reason.
It really is a new generation of compute-on-a-stick device.
It's fairly interesting to note what it's not: Android or Chrome OS. I suspect Microsoft will do quite well out of this, especially in the digital signage market, anywhere which is reasonably price sensitive but if developer time and cost can be reduced then they get a lot of leeway.
Still, yet another reminder that the cost of computing is collapsing. Most of the cost here is Intel margin and in the case of the more expensive one MS licenses.
Unfortunately, general purpose hardware and operating system needs a fair amount of juice to route and inspect 1gbps of traffic.
Best performance per watt I've found is the Edgerouter Lite but that has dedicated routing acceleration hardware to achieve what it does with the little mips processor it has.
Closest you'll find is Soekris, ALIX or APU for a routing platform. A Beaglebone black makes a nice little box for lightweight serving on its own.
I would be very surprised if a quad-core current-gen Atom could not do that in software, though. I could route 300Mbps through OpenBSD's pf on an AMD Geode.
The CeroWRT project has been searching for more than a year for a new generation of hardware to use as the platform for their development of better router software. There's nothing affordable that can keep up with the really fast DOCSIS connections available while doing anything intelligent on a per-packet basis.
If you're going to be running a server 24/7 anyways, it makes sense to equip it to also be your firewall and gateway. But that doesn't eliminate the huge gap between such a machine and off-the-shelf consumer networking equipment.
I've lost track of the number of cheap special-purpose appliances I've bought, which turned out to have limitations not present in a general-purpose PC. Consumer routers and NAS devices are already in this category, soon to be joined by compute sticks.
The problem is that buyers rarely know which part of the long tail they may need later. As Intel motherboards converge into a SoC and peripherals support USB3.1+, hopefully we end up with a future that looks like Google's Project Ara, i.e. small modules.
Being honest, it's a bit hacky for consumers...you'd be good to know Vyatta (what it uses under the hood) to get the most out of it, since there are still some things the web UI can't do (L2TP VPN being one, or PPTP without a Radius server for auth). However, it's a heck of a lot cheaper, smaller, and more power efficient than my previous P4 box running pfSense with Intel Pro/1000GTs, so I'm pretty happy with it.
I do think it'd be super awesome if Ubiquiti released a pfSense or m0n0wall-based EdgeRouter with the same hardware acceleration...I'd gladly pay $200 or so for that, but the ERLite is damn hard to beat for $100.
1. http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/MIPS/ERLite-3
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvermont
From memory the Trident boxes supported 640gbs of throughput on SFP+ or QSFP ports, about 10,000 prefixes/routes, a couple thousand ACL terms, 1 or 2u, and around 200watts. They cost maybe $20,000 at launch are down to $5-10,000 now depending on volume and vendor. That's great for a TOR or agg switch if you can manage the individual devices (as opposed to a switch chassis like a nexus 7K).
The other thing those really opened up is cheap as chips edge devices. 10,000 routes isnt a lot, but it works if you have limited peers or can do summarization off device like a route reflector. These chipsets, and trident in particular, also work great with things like OpenFlow as you move that expensive route computation off device to a specialized platform.
The trident platform is basically EOL'd, everyones moved on to Trident II for the most part. Trident II is like 100,000 prefixes, 50,000 ACLs, 1 or 2u, 200 to 400 watts, 1.2TBs of forwarding, and SFP+/QSFP ports. Price is $15-25,000 depending on volume and vendor etc. Pushing 640gbs of throughput for ~$20,000 is pretty crazy. It means I could build a single 10kVa server rack that pushes a legit 1tbs of traffic to the internets for about $200,000. Totally insane to think about compared to just a few years ago.
The next big change should be moving from 10/40 serdes to 25/100 in the next year or so. The Broadcom Tomahawk should be like 3tbs in 2u and a couple hundred watts for comparable prices. If you need to convert between 10/40 and 25/100 ("gearbox") cost and complexity will go up a bit.
http://etherealmind.com/merchant-silicon-vendor-software-ris... http://whiteboxswitch.com/collections/10-gigabit-ethernet-sw...
edit: and to clarify these platforms usually use Intel CPUs to run the OS/route engines. The OS/RE/HAL, like cumulus provides, is then responsible for pushing updates down to the switching asic.
Any thoughts on the just announced Annapurna purchase? I know it's not apples to apples but would be interested to hear your thoughts.
Hard to say. Intel has taken a loss on their mobile division lately [1], and I'm assuming this is a mobile-class processor. ARM has had them spooked, enough to make a major shift into mobile-first development and offering heavy discounts (or perhaps even selling at cost or at a loss) on mobile hardware.
[1] http://www.zdnet.com/article/intel-to-merge-pc-and-mobile-pr...!
You may want to take a look at these:
http://www.hystou.com/products/fanless-computers/celeron-103...
It's small and fanless with dual gigabit ethernet ports. I use one with VyOS as a dedicated firewall/router/VPN client.
Disclaimer: I bought mine from a 3rd party seller (via taobao) and not that site, although I believe they are the manufacturer.
Yeah, me too.. I currently use a fan-less Via board with integrated 686 compatible CPU. It's been great, but it's now 7 (?) years old so it might be time for an upgrade. Wonder if they still make them, they never got the attention they deserved.
Edit:
The boards are called EPIA and come in different sizes: http://www.viaembedded.com/en/products/boards/
Mine has this processor - It's not Intel or AMD, but "Pentium compatible" :)
Edit 2:Seems like these haven't matured a lot, and are expensive and hard to come by compared to other mini-itx boards. Do like the fanless, integrated processor on mine though, and that the power consumption is really low.
http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv7/marvell/mirabox
The arch support is good (apart of wireless).
What they say they're aiming for are simple, self-contained (display-only?) kiosks... which maybe could be useful, for some people. You could also use it as a media center. If it could magically transform a huge TV into a touch screen, on the other hand... that would be amazing.
What makes more sense to me, though, would be a phone with an HDMI port (or wireless video capability) that connects directly to the projector. It's one less device to carry. If you don't want to walk over to the phone to advance to the next slide, you could still add a Bluetooth remote or control it from one of those smart watches.
(I'm kind of suprised that Blackberry never tried something like what I just described--it would have been a great way to differentiate themselves in the enterprise sector and keep the iPhone at bay.)
The BlackBerry Z10 I have in some drawer at home has a micro HDMI out. Also BB OS 10 can act as an UPnP server and a Samba share, and I think it supports Miracast or something.
I'm sure modern phones and apps could handle it pretty well, though. Using the official MS Office apps would probably solve the major issues I had.
Its probably better to buy an ultra compact PC such as an Intel NUC or Gigabyte Brix, which come with VESA mounts for mounting onto the back of the TV, and store data on an SSD drive.
Laptops are great but clunky and not really solving the issue of computing without lugging it around. Tablets are great but are exceeding difficult to work on at the moment.
This will be a fine middle ground.
How so? Something like a Surface seems fine if you need a tablet for work.
I think the peripherals dock would be a decent solution for certain environments (schools, libraries, maybe hospitals, military bases, cruise ships, and such), but relying on public places to have well-kept and generally available peripherals would be folly.
Intel, you totally fail at social media!