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Comment by phren0logy | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.)

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