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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.