Watch out, Raspberry Pi: Intel unveils ultra-small Next Unit of Computing PC | Hacker News Reader

Watch out, Raspberry Pi: Intel unveils ultra-small Next Unit of Computing PC

extremetech.com

40 pointspalmar35 comments

I don't really see that this has much to do with the Raspberry Pi. If the board without the (much more powerful) CPU alone is $100, it's not really comparable other than being relatively small.

Agreed. ExtremeTech writes about some really cool stuff, but then goes does it in such a blogspammy way. There's an order of magnitude price difference between the products. The title couldn't be more linkbait.

I've started to skip the ET articles and just read the comments on HN, which are usually pretty interesting, and way more accurate.

Once you factor in shipping of the computer itself, and a case for the Rasp Pi ($20 or so), the price difference is actually quite small.

The speculated price point in the article is $100 (which is conjecture), but then you have to add an 1155 CPU and a couple of sticks of DDR3 memory. There's also no slot for an SD card, which is going to make storage more expensive.

Practical builds of this aren't going to be below $200 (and that's assuming the price quoted in the ET article is correct).

You're right about no case, but this unit also requires shipping.

I stand by order of magnitude.

Good point, re: RAM!

I don't know what the plan is, re: non-volatile storage. I guess you could plug in a USB memory stick (v. cheap), or use the PCIe headers.

Makes me wonder how cheap Intel could make a computer, if it really tried, though. I guess profit margins are the only thing stopping it from building something cheaper/better than the Rasp Pi.

you can't use USB memory to replace RAM. USB memory has read speed of ~10MB/s, a 100MHz DDR2 RAM has read speed of 3200MB/s.

This product is of a different class. You can't have fancy I/O like Thunderbolt and USB3 and compete on price with RPi.

Unless I'm terribly misreading, he wasn't suggesting USB memory to replace RAM, but rather to replace a hard drive (or the SD Card on the RPi) ("re: non-volatile storage")

Small? You'll need a mobile i5 processor to go with the board, coupled with a stick of RAM, and some storage. The price difference is at least $250.

Considering the tiny form factor, I suspect it will come with the CPU. (Think of it as a small laptop. Fiddling with the heatsink/fan assembly is probably going to be quite tricky in the NUC.)

30 times the power consumption.

7 times the cost (you probably wanted a CPU and RAM to go with the motherboard).

No programmable pins for controlling the world.

Closed design.

It's just a tiny PC motherboard. Nothing to do with a Raspberry Pi other than the hook Sebastian Anthony chose for his title.

Isn't Raspberry Pi also pretty much a proprietary design? Certainly the Broadcom chipset they use isn't available to the general public, nor is information about the chipset available without an NDA.

The Broadcom chip documentation is not generally available. Beyond that, you probably can't even buy the Broadcom chip.

The GPU (the bulk of the chip's compute power) is a black box with a binary library that works with some versions of Linux for the time being but will eventually be abandoned by whoever is wrote it. That is just the current state of the world for embedded GPUs.

But looking outward…

The Raspberry Pi Foundation commits to documenting the exposed hardware of the SoC in their FAQ. (Think GPIOs, analogs, serials, etc).

The computer itself is has published schematics: http://www.raspberrypi.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Raspbe...

I got the impression that the Raspberry Pi Foundation was thinking about how to license the design, perhaps a CC, but I don't see that they have made a decision. It is in many ways it is moot. They could give you the Gerber files, but you wouldn't be able to get a BCM2835.

My first thought was "watch out bicycle makers, other people are making cars".

The RasPi is a disposable learning and tinkering board like an arduino. This Intel thing is just a laptop without a screen. Genuinely nothing to see here.

Yet, it is. A lot of people interested in the RasPi would be far better of with something like this (people are seriously considering using the RasPi as a workstation, and a lot of hype comes from that people actually expect it to be a laptop without a screen but in reality it is more like your old phone without a screen). And price isn't really that big of a deal anyway.

For hardware projects the RasPi is hard to beat (especially when considering the price) but as a HTPC, lightweight workstation or server this is just lightyears ahead (and for such projects price isn't that big of a deal). And unfortunately a lot of the hype around RasPi is around the latter.

The author of this article clearly has no idea about what a system like Raspberry Pi is aiming for. The lack of Windows compatibility is one of its most important features. It's about kids learning to do fun, interesting, challenging things with a computer. It's not about using an office suite or playing TF2.

You could install Linux on the NUC, too. x86 support isn't inherently a bad thing, surely.

No, not at all. It's just that statements like "and likewise, developing for the NUC will be as easy as developing for a standard, Windows-based x86 PC; two perks the Raspberry Pi will not enjoy." makes it seem like a lack of x86 support is a bad thing in the Pi's case, which it's not, since ARM is fine for what it's meant to do.

As for the part about development being as easy as a Windows x86 box; the same could be said about Linux on the Raspberry Pi. It's the same OS you'd run on an x86 box.

Just seems like an apples/oranges comparison. Like others have commented, seems like a lot of 'tech journalists' seem to assume small form factor == Raspberry Pi competitor/alternative.

Besides the price of Windows would be too high for it.

David Braben:

it’s a small PC. There’s nothing really you can’t do with this that you couldn’t do with a PC from way back. We can run things like OpenOffice, Twitter, browse the web, Facebook etc

http://www.edge-online.com/features/david-braben-interview

That's great, although they're not a competitor to Raspberry. Speculation on the author's part aside, I can't imagine Intel offering this anywhere near a $100 price point. But without the comparison offered up by the author, it's just another tiny-motherboard-from-Intel article -- and who's going to read that?

But hey, I hope they try to compete with Raspberry Pi, because that causes a race to the bottom of the price point. Since Raspberry is already there, anyone else who wants to join the party just adds more options to those interested in these devices.

Although in no way a competitor to the rPi, this is pretty awesome.

It could easily become a main system with surprisingly few compromises-- (given thunderbolt and the reasonable iGPU)... and i really doubt the board alone will be available for < $200.

there is nothing reasonable about igpu

tell me about opengl drivers

tellll meeeeeeeee

Bigger size, 3x the price (at least), requires fan.. not in the same league as the RPi at all. I wish tech writers would stop thinking "SMALL COMPUTER = RPI COMPETITOR!".

Get down to that same ~$35 price point, and we'll talk.

" It almost certainly won’t be as cheap as the $25 Raspberry Pi, but a price point around $100 would be realistic."

I call BS on it costing close to $100. There is no way given the cost of the processor alone.

I think this is only for the casing and motherboard, without RAM, storage or CPU. At least it's what I understand from the article.

I reckon that too, then all the more it's not even a competitor with RPi. RPi is a complete system with processor and RAM.

Say a mobile i5 costs $150 and a RAM that costs $20. We're looking at a $300 system that consumes 10x the power of RPi. I think this is a useful system on its own, but it's not a competitor of RPi.

* developing for the NUC will be as easy as developing for a standard, Windows-based x86 PC*

Conversely, it will be as hard as developing for a standard, Windows-based x86 PC.

The big draw for the pi is the price at around $30 it's a very feature rich machine. The pi would actually do better in the market that intel is targeting (kiosks and digital displays) do to its size and ability to run off USB power. You could strap it to the back of a HDTV and piggyback on one of the USB ports most flat screens ship with these days.

Personally, I'm actually more excited about this than the Raspberry Pi. Yes it consumes more power and is basically just a small PC, but that's actually what I'm more interested in for pc-tv development. The fact that it could run Windows too is actually a plus.

Geez, this looks a lot like the PC104 boards we drop into our robots.

It's bigger, more juice-intensive, and probably a lot more expensive than the RPi. It's not even in the same market league.

Headline fail.

Why do I think its going to leave another bad taste in my mouth like overpriced Atom's lackluster performance did?

Watch out Hyundai! Ferarri just made a compact sports car that is 5-10x the cost of yours, and gets 5 MPG.

Maybe Intel can buy XScale/PXA back. This is just sad.

"x86 Windows software ecosystem"

That's the whole point of the RaspberryPi.

The current UK IT curriculum:

Boot up Windows XP/Vista/7 (or whatever the school kept up with)

Type some text into MS-Office

Don't change any of the settings because that might affect another user and we would have to get an outside IT contractor in to fix the 'problem'

The whole point of RPi is to have a turn it on and it's ready, one machine per student, system with an OS image that can be reflashed by the student in minutes if they do too much damage. Just like a 1980s 8bit micro

Is this really a problem? Schools have long solved this problem with imaging software like deepfreeze or steadystate. Not to mention, they might not be too fond of emacs or or write a term paper on gedit. You can piss on Word all you like, but it gets used for a reason.

Its weird to see the rpi shoehorned into some poor-mans deepfreeze solution. Its really a hobbyists platform like the beagleboard. Its going to go into some cool embedded projects and power some cool toys. Its not another desktop PC. We're well served in that are.

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