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Comment by Jormundir | Hacker News Reader

This looks awesome. Finally a piece of tech I actually want, and by Intel of all companies.

The bigger consumer companies have been shuffling their feet, releasing arbitrary, very closed off pieces of tech that I don't really need. I really applaud Intel for making the tiny little PC I've been wanting for media and linux tomfoolery. The Chromecast was a no-go, and now with an apple tv, I'm feeling a little too enclosed; they don't have enough apps to satisfy all my media needs.

I've been watching the mini-pc market, chronically unsatisfied with what's been released up to this point. The Intel compute stick finally looks like the thing I've been looking for, mainly because they balance the size and low price, with just enough power for what I need. To top it off they're offering a Linux version, so I don't have to be worried about buying into a closed off platform.

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I find that Intel makes quite a few great products and initiatives. They just don't market it as loudly as others. The Intel NUC (http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/nuc/overview.html) is quite a versatile machine - smaller, better performance and value for money than mac minis, and more hacker friendly. It even has a cute unboxing experience (The box plays the intel jingle when you open it)

Then there are initiatives like the Intel Realsense cam (like Kinect), Edison, Moblin( which morphed into Meego and later Sailfish). Intel often doesn't get the credit it deserves - Contributing to open source and open standards, having intervened in the markets when someone (usually Apple or Microsoft) got too dominant or comfortable(That was what Meego, Ultrabooks, NUC was about). They certainly make the market more interesting.

I guess this one is aimed at Android TV, and meant to level the field for Microsoft and Linux-based systems.

That is because their target customer has never been the end user. How many people with a smart phone have heard of Qualcomm?

Well. Intel has always pitched themselves to the end-customer. The 'Intel Inside', Ultrabook, etc., campaigns have all been so that the customer insists on an Intel device.

This kind of branding is called ingredient branding. They try to remain visible as the supplier of a component. Intel is the textbook example.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingredient_branding

But that's not to sell to the end user, but to make the ability to put those Intel Inside etc. stickers on your product a valuable feature for OEMs when considering whether to buy from Intel or a competitor.

I got my Dad a NUC for Christmas...He hasn't really been using it yet. I think this might have been a more interesting and simple gift, wish it came out in time. I did get to play with the NUC because I wanted to have it all configured and ready to use. It was interesting to see how they got all of the components packed in and I was impressed by the performance. Main issue I had was graphics support, because I wanted to put Elementary OS on it to see if he'd be interested in trying out Linux. Ended up going with the latest Ubuntu instead (Elementary OS Luna is built on Ubuntu 12.04) which worked fine.

My Dad had gone through a couple of those Shuttle "Mini" computers (the motherboards were Flex-ATX, slightly bigger than Mini-ITX and obviously needed to be smaller than micro-ATX), so I thought the NUC (between Nano-ITX and Pico-ITX [1]) might appeal to him. They both died and he's currently using a standard desktop. I believe one or both of his Shuttle's died due to a PSU failure, so it's nice to have the external power brick on the NUC.

He and my Mom had previously been using a Windows Media Center desktop with a tuner card and Comcast cable, but they're using DirecTV boxes on all the TVs now so not much need for a HTPC. He said he was thinking about trying to use the NUC with Windows 8 and a touch screen somehow...Not really sure how he can accomplish that. Besides introducing him to Linux, I was thinking he could use it on his TV as just an alternate computer and wanted to show him how to use Synergy to control it with his desktop keyboard/mouse. He's currently switching his TV between the DirecTV box and his desktop as a second display.

At the very least it's a backup, and he could potentially take it on trips as a more powerful alternative to a laptop. There's just so many different options for computing these days. It's like information overload, but with hardware.

[1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/5800/slimming-desktops-down-in... (existence of Nano-ITX and Pico-ITX pointed out in the comments)

> There's just so many different options for computing these days. It's like information overload, but with hardware.

Yeah. I have two Dreamplugs lying there unused at the moment, plus a CuBox used as NAS/TimeMachine, and a MicroPython waiting for some free time... so many options, so little time.

They are also getting so powerful, I'm seriously considering a few "enterprise" scenarios. Remember when IT meant mainframes, so individual departments would just bypass them and buy their own PCs? I think we're ready for a new wave of that decentralized approach: between mobile and these little bad boys, there's plenty of power around to run a number of applications that would have required a rack server 5 or 10 years ago. Now John Accountant could just buy a little silent box and put it on his desk, without having to go through hellish rounds of IT approvals.

Since the silent box can run multiple VMs, it can be the equivalent of a small rack from yesteryear.

> between mobile and these little bad boys, there's plenty of power around to run a number of applications that would have required a rack server 5 or 10 years ago. Now John Accountant could just buy a little silent box and put it on his desk, without having to go through hellish rounds of IT approvals.

Which would be nice, if we had the hardware of today with the IT practices of a time when enterprises might exert centralized control of departmental server purchases but not exert the same control over individual desktop system purchases and even the software installation on those desktops.

Today, I was working at the HQ of a major UK telco. I connected my personal MBP to a random ethernet cable and lo, I could RDP on servers and do everything I wanted, without any prior authorisation. If you think all enterprise networks are as locked down as the ones found in banks, you're sorely mistaken. BYOD is a reality.

I suggest you put OpenELEC on it: dead simple distro for Kodi (XBMC) that just works! I used it to replace my WDTV Live that died recently and I couldn't be happier.

"I got my Dad a NUC for Christmas...He hasn't really been using it yet."

I never understood why he did that.

It was a good NUC and he needed a good NUC. If he had used it or even honed it, or took it out of his pocket and looked at it -- that's all he had to do.

Pretty sure this comment flew East of most readers' heads. ;)

> It even has a cute unboxing experience (The box plays the intel jingle when you open it)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjdyudYdIPc

That's very cute, however if it's the box that actually plays the sound isn't it terribly wasteful, ecologically?

there are birthday card that do the same, it's very little extra stuff compared to the computer itself, I imagine.

Good point. However to me it still just seems terribly wasteful/stupid. Considering the aux battery in most computing devices, couldn't the musical thingie be embedded into the computer itself?

It is completely irrelevant, ecologically speaking.

> It is completely irrelevant, ecologically speaking.

How so? It makes the box unrecyclable; worse still, as soon as such an item is detected in the recycling plant it will often cause the whole batch of material to be rejected and dumped[1].

No-one has time to pick-through cardboard removing batteries and circuitry.

[1] Source: anecdote from a colleague who worked in a 'recyclarium'. Contaminated material causes the line to be stopped, batch dumped and machines cleaned.

The actual pre-processing sorting is quite fascinating, using spectrometers to detect the type of materials.

From one of the comments above: "It's not the box, but a small plastic enclosure"

And while I sympathise, consider that this is part of packaging for a computer, where the manufacture of the computer itself will consume many times as many resources, and the power to use the computer over its lifetime will consume many times as many resources. With respect to the overall environmental impact of the purchase of that device, the inclusion of a device like that will be a rounding error.

It's not really an excuse to waste more resources though. Saying "this only wastes a tiny amount of resources compared to this other thing" isn't justification to waste it anyway.

agreed. baby steps!

A baby probably has thousands of times the environmental impact of this. Possibly millions.

The dirty relationship between life and entropy could be "hoard as much energy as possible, multiply and feel free to waste energy for fun."

A birthday card that plays the Intel jingle would make a pretty good gift for a geek :P

It's not the box, but a small plastic enclosure with some very cheap electronics (I believe they even used a led as a light sensor) and the battery lasts very very long. I wouldn't know on the impact of that on the ecology though. When it comes to recycling I remember from long long ago that PCB's have a pretty large ecological footprint, but than again, it's not part of the packaging, so it can be easily taken out and used for other purposes!

I was a little sad when I took mine apart to find that the chip was epoxied. I was hoping it would be something easily reprogrammable that I could give to my girlfriend to use at school (she teaches 3,4,5 year olds, so having a box that makes a noise when you open it is something that gets their attention).

After having received one from a vendor (Vidyo), I was looking into creating auto-playing video cards for my own company. It seems http://www.bigdawgspromo.com/ is one of the leading vendors, but their per-piece pricing is pretty hefty. Pretty neat stuff, and they are re-programmable.

Thanks for that link. For a long time I've toyed with the idea of a dedicated video card (as in business/greeting style); brings video to the self-containment of a book: immutable physical instance of content, including the reader/viewer. Still a bit aways from what I had in mind (think: little larger than a credit card, cheap) but well on its way.

That would have been too good to be true, haven't even thought about that!

I remember way back I was trying to make a cheap wifi-powered box with a display that could play short video's and stuff. The base idea came from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ywr0A2aC_Jk, and I'd use a very cheap 3g-wifi router running openwrt as base. But in the end the firmware changed and made it impossible.

But nowadays with an arduino mini pro, i2c, cheap small displays or audio modules you can get a long way! It does however require you to purchase a lot of stuff like resistors, opamps, breadboards.. etc. And in theory, with the ESP8266-module you could make any device internet-connected.

The thing to do is to convert it into something like 'equivalent driven miles' and then calibrate your outrage to that number.

It's not just the NUC; don't forget the Minnowboard Max, which is also Intel-sponsored at least. It has slightly lower specs than this stick, but it's still far more powerful than the R-Pi and great for home automation work. I've got a couple here and I have no real complaints.

This. e.g., not many people know that Intel created OpenCV and open sourced it.

I was forced to use NUCs for a project. They were under powered for me. All I needed to do was draw 5 fullscreen quads at 1920x1080 but all they could handle was 4 fullscreen quads at 1280x720.

I'm sure they're great for some things so YMMV

Was that an Ivy Bridge or Haswell GPU?

To be fair, that is a big requirement... Loads of mid to high end graphics cards from just a few years backfail at dual QHD screen.

I power 2x 1920x1080 screens off of a NUC and am very happy.

No, it isn't.

1920 * 1080 pixels * 5 * 60 = 622MPixel/s of fillrate required.

Radeon 9700 Pro, high end from over 10 years ago, had a fillrate of 2600MPixels/s

Let's take a high end graphics card from a few years back, say... GTX 480? A 2010 card? That has a fillrate of 33,600 MPixels/sec.

5x 1920x1080 quads is child's play for any reasonable desktop GPU part. In fact high end cards from 2009 could game at 5760x2160 (that's 6x 1920x1080 displays) off of a single card.

Most of those examples were tech demonstrators and reference designs, AFAIK. A small number of units, if any, were available. I don't recall many partners bringing them to market. Intel's not in the business of selling a couple thousand of these units, they're looking for OEMs to pick it up and sell millions. Or at least shape/gauge the future market.

Exactly. Intel seems to be mainly interested in selling more processors and motherboards to OEMs than anything else. Intel seems to intervene on occasion to shake things up or show OEMs how its done. For eg., the Ultrabook was to help laptop manufacturers who were getting clobbered by Apple. NUC was so that OEMs would build competitors (like the Gigabyte BRIX Pro) to the Mac Mini and so on.

Looks like they just got a version bump http://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-nuc-broadwell,28344.h...

I hope they make one with a full size HDMI (maybe even HDMI 2?) next year.

Do they also have a laptop variant? Their Hardware is actually quite awesome - especially for Linux users

When I was in the market for a small low-power home server, I actually found the NUC's to be overpriced and under-performing.

There's no i7 option, and they will run you about the same base price as an Gigabyte Brix which does offer i7 and/or i5's with more powerful graphics (and AMD APU options for very nice graphics if required).

My home server did not require much graphics of course, but the i7 quad core is very much so a nice-to-have.

Even a Zotac Zbox with an i5 will get you more bang-for-the-buck since they are about $50-$100 cheaper, and come with more peripherals (like dual Gigabit ethernet ports).

NUCs are the modern incarnation of Intel whitebox reference motherboards. If they were too cheap or tailored to specific use cases, OEMs would be out of business.

I don't think Intel necessarily wants to dominate or even lead the market with these offerings, they want to spur the market to fill the niche now that they've shown the demand and the ability(and the parts for sale). Intel didn't want to sell ultrabooks itself, but it very much wanted a vibrant marketplace so it could sell more high-end parts, and keep Apple from leveraging their market position for better pricing from Intel.

I agree. I think they want to more or less be the apple of more open hardware. They aren't planning to make money off NUC, they're planning to make money off their chips. This is ultimately a strategy for getting more people to want more of their chip. Right now all the slickest devices are arm powered... so many shiny glassy sleek looking cell phones and tables and hardly an x86 in sight... They're not selling $/performance here, that's just a barrior to entry, they're selling a vision and a brand... intel inside

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/nuc/products-overview... has i7 "coming Q2 2015. Prodict details coming soon" Number of cores? That page doesn't say.

> The Chromecast was a no-go

I find that the Chromecast is the perfect tech item. It does a few things and does them extremely well. Part of the reason why it out sold and is out used more then any other media player.

I love my Chromecast but I think the major reason it has done well is the price. $30 is still fantastic.

It is an interesting comparison. You could buy 5 Chromecasts for the price of one of these Intel sticks, so it seems not a fair comparison. BUT, chances are you really are going to only use one or the other, so in that way it is necessary to decide.

They are apples vs oranges.

Chromecast = Media Player

Stick = Computer

I am still thinking I want a NUC though.

Just seconding that opinion. I love my chromecasts. Using it with videostream on an Android phone is a great combination.

I've personally found the Chromecast to be a little underpowered in a lot of circumstances, particularly when it comes to mirroring a tab with a video playing. I ended up ordering one of those Fire TV sticks because Gary Busey told me to, and because it has way better specs; still waiting for it to arrive, but a couple of family members have already tried it out with a lot of success, and I imagine it'll go well with the Fire HDX my grandma got for Christmas.

Meanwhile, this Intel stick looks even better. Between this and the announcement of a new NUC with an i7, it looks like I'll be saving up for a couple more Intel-powered Linux devices this year.

But yeah, the Chromecast is still handy sometimes, and it does do some things well (like YouTube and Pandora). It's just not always the best fit for everyone.

>particularly when it comes to mirroring a tab with a video playing.

That has nothing to do with the processing power of the Chromecast and everything to do with the casting system. It's all just a video stream to the Chromecast.

True, but I wouldn't have had to resort to tab mirroring if Chromecast supported Amazon Prime Video.

Which, admittedly, is also not a Chromecast issue per se, but since the Fire TV stick does support it (for obvious reasons), and since I ought to be watching videos and justifying my Prime membership, it'll probably end up being the more useful product to me. An Intel stick would probably end up being even more useful, since I wouldn't be at the mercy of Amazon to provide support for things (and would instead be at the mercy of XBMC or Kodi or whatever the hell it's called now to provide support for things).

Got my Fire TV stick before Christmas (impulse purchase when it was available for $19). I find it to be a much more useful device in general. Actually being able to select apps/videos through a UI on-screen is much better than dealing with a separate device, and having a dedicated remote to be more usable as well. The videos themselves seem play better.

I now use that over the PS4 for streaming video now. Chromecast I found really only useful for casting Youtube videos, which is a really niche use for a dedicated device.

I also bought mine for $19. It is used for streaming Amazon Prime. I tried to like it but using my phone and computer with Chromecast is so much easier. 50%+ of my use is to watch YouTube videos with Family and Friends.

How do you know how much it's going to cost? I don't see that information anywhere.

http://techreport.com/news/27619/intel-compute-stick-is-a-14... $149

Ah. Thanks for the link. The 149$ version comes with Windows 8.1 Preloaded. The linux version is 89$.

For something less than an AppleTV, that is indeed appealing.

Intel Linux support is usually pretty good so that Linux option is certainly appealing.

The Linux version has only 1GB RAM and only 8GB onboard flash.

More than enough to run XBMC (multimedia) or File server (own cloud, bittorrent sync, etc...).

Once again Linux is the "cheap" option. Linux isn't used by people to save the license cost and well I know I have a much greater need for RAM compared to the average computer user. So I would buy a $149 version then have to install Linux on top of that.

Sure, but Linux can also generally run much more efficiently than Windows. I think having Linux on the cheap version could conceivably be both a cut in licensing fees and also a way to make economy hardware specs viable.

I wonder how big the gap is now. It would be interesting to see some benchmarks comparing Windows 8.1 with Bing (where the 32-bit version runs in 1GB) with an equivalent full-spec Linux.

That's a good point, the recent push by Microsoft towards mobile devices has undoubtedly led to significant improvements. Without some hard data I am certainly being speculative, just speaking from experience.

I mentioned it above, but there is no license fee for Windows 8.1 with Bing. It's completely free for OEMs to sell on their hardware, they just can't modify the search settings at install time. The user can do whatever they want with the search settings, and it's a full 8.1 install from a technical viewpoint.

Basically, the difference in price between the two SKUs is purely hardware based. So, buy whichever hardware you need, and install GNU/Linux.

On a side note, I have an HP Stream 7 tablet with an Atom CPU and 1GB RAM, and it runs 8.1 very well. I'd imagine even the lower spec SKU of the Intel stick would run it fine. Storage space would be the only real issue for that OS.

What a price difference. Wow. Dozens, nay, hundred of hours learning Linux finally pays off. Seriously now, I'm really pleased to see that you can choose Linux and pay so much less. Of course on a relatively more expensive machine that difference isn't much, but it's certainly a stark difference on such a cheap device.

Edit: I see there's a hardware difference too. That's a bit of a shame. I wonder what corporate forces are in action here..

I don't think it's evil corporate forces. They wanted a "budget" one with lower specs and realised they could reduce the price further by removing the Windows license.

I doubt it's actually that much of the price tag.

Considering Microsoft is giving away Windows 8.1 "with Bing" free for small devices[1], I doubt the OS has any bearing on the price difference.

[1] http://www.howtogeek.com/195934/what-exactly-is-windows-8.1-...

You're probably right. I didn't mean evil corporate forces. I will certainly concede that I used the wrong term. I was earnestly curious what the justification was. I should've said "business justification" or some such, given the (reasonable) interpretation of what I actually said.

> Wow. Dozens, nay, hundred of hours learning Linux finally pays off.

Eh, the hundreds of hours I spent learning Windows were much less useful to me.

I don't know, but since its form-factor and size puts in direct contention with Android Sticks (which go for about 60$), it should be priced similarly. Also it has to be cheaper than the cheapest Celeron-based Intel NUC(140$). So i expect the price should be somewhere in between.

Worth mentioning NUCs don't come with memory or storage.

Or wifi...

Certain models(I think the new-gen celerons) do. Other-wise you need to buy m-sata wifi cards.

If it is better it could cost more. Some people probably thinks a full Windows/Linux computer is worth more than an Android stick.

Web design/business fail: The page is lacking a "Register to get updates" form. I find this to be a common frustration point for industrial product companies. Their websites typically have different degrees of sucking.

Hardware design fail: A male HDMI connector on something this big is a bad idea. You don't want to hang this kind of weight (imagine USB other cables connected to it) off an HDMI connector on a TV or monitor. The female connectors are not designed as load-bearing devices. It'd be far better to put a female HDMI connector on the stick and let people use a proper HDMI cable.

Surely you can get an extension HDMI cable if that bothers you.

Haven't you heard of MK809 dongle? Quad core, much cheaper than Intel, with full Android unlike Chromecast, able to install Linux distribution: http://amzn.com/B00EE4KKDA

I am of two minds about Intel. Lately they have been producing some fairly interesting products. But at the same time they have a virtual stranglehold on the x86 ISA.

Really? PS4 and Xbone are AMD, and selling like truckloads.

Vishera is a beast. Love it. And I fell in love with this intel gadget which I wasn't expecting.

Yes, it is an odd development. But then what is now AMD's GPU division, ATI, used to be THE supplier of console gaming GPUs.

Sure, there are issues with the ARM world. But i kinda prefer the vibrant market there over the 2 1/2 horse race that is x86.

Many ARM CPUs are licensed transistor layouts from ARM. There's only a handful of companies actually designing their cores. Most of the diversity comes from the other bits of silicon in the SoC, but there's plenty of diversity in the x86 motherboard space too.

Who is the half? Via?

Yeah, and maybe i was a bit nice. Could just as well have put them down as 1/4 i guess.

For Xbox 360 and WiiU, the PS3 had an nVidia GPU

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