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Compute Card, a Credit Card-Sized Compute Platform
- sigmar 10y ago>- Connection to devices will be done via an Intel Compute Card slot with a new standard connector (USB-C plus extension) >- USB-C plus extension connector will provide USB, PCIe, HDMI, DP and additional signals between the card and the device That sounds pretty interesting. Hoping they don't keep these priced too far above the hobbyist price point.
- RandomOpinion 10y agoPer the Ars Technica article someone else posted to HN (http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/01/intels-compute-card-is-a-pc-that-can-fit-in-your-wallet/ http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/01/intels-compute-card-i...), these are said to be the replacement for the currently available Intel Compute Stick devices (http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/compute-stick/intel-compute-stick.html http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/compute-stick/intel-c...). At least to me, that suggests that they will retail for around the same price range as the Compute Sticks: $150 to $500, depending on the model.
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- achow 10y agoGizmodo says.. There’s no word on pricing, and Intel stresses that although anyone can buy a Compute Card when they’re available, you will still need to build the dock to power the device and cool it, and that will likely be outside the realm of possibilities for your average tinkerer. http://gizmodo.com/intels-incredibly-tiny-compute-card-could-soon-run-your-1790826525 http://gizmodo.com/intels-incredibly-tiny-compute-card-could...
- lightedman 10y agoThe average tinkerer would just slap a heat sink and fan on it, power that fan with a 12V wall wart, and rig up the power and data connections, dock be damned.
- mmastrac 10y agoThis seems like a much more advanced version of EOMA68, a compute card project re-using old PCMCIA connectors. I feel like USB-C gives much more flexibility: it has a well-defined configuration enumeration protocol that's already supported everywhere. There's a lot more options for extensibility and future-proofing with USB-C. With the onboard storage this is one step closer to my dream: the ability to plug a phone's compute module into a desktop to give me access to a more powerful GPU, extra storage, etc. My big question: will this card format be an open standard, or will Intel be locking it down?
- zkms 10y ago> re-using old PCI-express connectors. actually it's PCMCIA connectors (which have nothing to do with PCI express)
- mmastrac 10y agoOops, typo - will fix.
- nextos 10y agoAnd less waste / nonsense. If you have an appliance, you'd typically like to upgrade it's computing module much more frequently than the envelope. A nice side-effect might be that interfaces become more open, and you can run e.g. whatever OS you like inside your smart cheese grater.
- astrodust 10y agoI'm starting to wonder if next-generation blade systems might not just have a bunch of USB-C connectors to act as a backplane. They provide power, data connectivity, external storage links and anything more. Small, self-contained modules like this could contain the CPU and whatever other components are best to have locally, like a small local SSD and memory.
- detaro 10y agoFor blades I would expect mostly PCIe lanes to the outside. USB-C IMHO adds a lot of extras that are not needed for that use case.
- wonko1 10y agoIt seems like a neat idea but their use case is: "interactive refrigerators and smart kiosks to security cameras and IoT gateways." I can't see a strong advantage for Intel here. I don't think there's anyway a modular solution can compete with an integrated design using low cost ARM SOCs (typically <= 1USD for something capable of running Linux in China). I was kind of hoping this would be targeted at high density server applications, which could be interesting but doesn't seem to be the case.
- joezydeco 10y agoIt's a CES launch. You have to announce that kind of stuff or nobody pays any attention. Smart kiosks? Really? It's 2017, not 1995. Intel can keep screwing around with this stuff while Qualcomm+NXP+Freescale slowly captures the rest of the market they don't have yet.
- visarga 10y ago> Smart kiosks? Just embed a tablet with an app in a kiosk.
- joezydeco 10y agoEveryone has phones in their hands with web browsers. We haven't needed shopping mall video directory boards for a decade. Or shopping malls, for that matter.
- oneeyedpigeon 10y agoExcept that: - Not everyone has smart phones, do they? I mean, maybe 95% do, but it's still pretty harsh on the 5% to just abandon them altogether - Your phone might not have any power - A mall directory board is maybe ~20 times bigger than my phone - MUCH easier to use - Much harder to locate whatever website I'm supposed to use than just walking up to a screen which is already displaying the correct 'site' and doesn't pop up all sorts of notifications / start ringing in the middle of your interaction / allow you to get distracted by a million and one other things. I was actually in a mall the other day, looking for a video directory board and couldn't find one. I'm not convinced there wasn't one, but I had my phone on me, tried to find useful info. on what I thought was the mall's website, and just gave up.
- joezydeco 10y agoI wish Intel would try to work bottom-up with the manufacturers putting IoT-class parts into their products instead of trying to push it top-down. Yeah, I get it, that's how they work. It's not going to change. A big glossy launch at CES with no details does absolutely nothing for my project. When an NXP or STMicro rep comes into the office and shows me what's new, maybe drops off a devkit...that's useful.
- deelowe 10y agoHas any of this stuff taken off? What became of the "SD Card size IoT device" AKA edison? I know the dev kit is a terrible unsupported mess, but are vendors using it for anything?
- adammunich 10y agoNever seen an Edison or Curie in the wild.
- davidbanham 10y agoI have! The application would have been a much better fit for a CHIP, but I've nevertheless seen one.
- benmcnelly 10y agoI have personally made two prototypes for people using the Edison plus a the amazing add-ons from sparkfun. The integrated wifi and bluetooth are great, and once you are done setting it up, you end up with a battery stacked on an Edison, so a full blown computer with wifi and bluetooth you can switch on and stick anywhere you can fit two thumbs.
- 69mlgsniperdad 10y agoI was never able to find an Edison, but did find a curie however it seems they have given up on it since their big marketing campaign. you can buy the dev boards but I found it impossible to find a price or supply for the soc itself. also the quark processor that powers it apparently has a segfault with the only workaround being disabling lock, which presents a lot of issues for certain scenarios, specifically multi-threading.(https://communities.intel.com/docs/DOC-22478 https://communities.intel.com/docs/DOC-22478) Not sure if that is related to their abandoning of the product line, if that is indeed the case. No idea what's going on. also worth noting, the actual SOC itself is significantly larger than all of the marketing pictures show it. Not sure if they used an alternate, cheaper form factor for the dev kit or what.
- LyalinDotCom 10y agoAny word if it will run Windows IoT or just Linux?
- adav 10y agoThe BBC Click demo showed it running some variety of Windows 10.
- amluto 10y agoIf this were actually credit-card-sized (i.e., literally fit in a credit card slot), had a smart card contact, and supported SGX, I'd be excited. Oh, well.
- jeff_marshall 10y agoAre you using and/or developing for SGX? I looked into it and got put off by the need to deal with intel for licensing and signing keys, but I'd be curious to know if anyone is doing something interesting with it.
- amluto 10y agoThere is some work afoot to improve the licensing process. I will not develop for it under the current licensing regime.
- Handwash 10y agoI do wish that something like this (and the compute stick) will become mainstream. My company has multiple office location and I need to commute to work. Bringing a 5-kg+ of load everyday (laptop, charger, etc) is sure hurting my back. With this, I can just bring a card or a stick, and plug it in on my company card/stick reader and start working.
- chrisper 10y agoIsn't Windows To Go exactly meant for this? All you need is a certified USB drive which you can plug in at home and at office.
- jeff_marshall 10y agoYes it is. Some variants even include a hardware security module so that you can store your encryption keys on it and keep everything but the bootloader encrypted (assuming proper software support of course).
- dougmwne 10y agoYes, and it works better than I'd ever have expected. I'm actually using a regular usb3 flash drive as a keychain gaming rig. Skyrim running in 5 minutes on any PC or Mac. Start here: http://www.intowindows.com/4-tools-to-create-windows-to-go-usb-of-windows-10/ http://www.intowindows.com/4-tools-to-create-windows-to-go-u...
- BinaryIdiot 10y agoI never really thought of that but that's pretty smart. Then you can take your games anywhere and a USB3 256GB drive is super cheap nowadays you could pack a lot of games on it and play at friends houses or really anywhere. Slick. Granted I'd rather just have better gaming capability in a smaller, dockable device like a Surface but I see the merit for sure.
- gtvwill 10y agoMate buy yourself a decent backpack. 5kg, hell 10kg extra weight shouldn't cause anybody back problems even if you wear it for a 12 hour shift.
- kondro 10y agoNo manufacturer wants this. They don't want to sell you updated internals, they want to sell you a new product. Not to mention no one wants to pay the Intel-tax for their embedded processors. I wish Intel would stop creating products nobody wants and actually work on shipping their core products on-time.
- sb8244 10y ago> I wish Intel would stop creating products nobody wants and actually work on shipping their core products on-time. If a company cuts X employees from Product B, those employees probably are not going to Product A to work (different skill sets, budgets, diversify product line, etc).
- ryukafalz 10y ago>No manufacturer wants this. >I wish Intel would stop creating products nobody wants Those are two very different things. I, as a consumer, want this, because I would very much like to upgrade the processor in my laptops without replacing the whole device, for environmental and cost reasons. (I backed the EOMA-68 project for the same reason.) If Intel can get a few manufacturers on board with the idea, more power to them.
- pmontra 10y agoThere are laptops with replaceable CPU, GPU, RAM, disks, etc. I own one, a HP ZBook 15 from 2014. However they're not common and I see how low end laptops could become docking stations for a compute card. They're going to have an internal USB hub to connect IO devices to the card USB C, disk, screen, touch, keyboard. I wonder how much that's going to degrade performances. There's going to be a limit to the upgrade options, depending on the cooling capabilities of the laptop.
- gm-conspiracy 10y agoI thought you were talking about the new Macbook Pro.
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- owenversteeg 10y ago- 95x55x5mm (credit card 86x54x0.8mm) - Mid 2017 - Needs a dock to be powered and cooled - USB-C plus another unnamed connector, looks like this (http://i.imgur.com/887iweg.jpg http://i.imgur.com/887iweg.jpg) - Built in WiFi/Bluetooth - Up to 7th gen Intel vPro processor
- hyperpallium 10y agoSo... 6 Credit Cards sized. Actually, my phone isn't much bigger than a credit card, excluding thickness. But this device might be a lot more powerful. Though what "7th gen vPro" actually means re. performance isn't disclosed.
- gm-conspiracy 10y agoIt means built-in RAT.
- sbierwagen 10y agoNeeds a dock to be powered and cooled Cooled? Obviously no water connectors, so, what, it has to be touching a metal plate to sink the heat away?
- aceperry 10y agoLooks like a really cool form factor with intriguing possibilities. Only problem with Intel is most of their chips require a lot of power. That's going to be a big problem if they're trying to play in the small embedded device space that depends heavily on battery power. One thing about Intel though, they've been throwing out lots of smaller devices hoping to get some traction somewhere. Hopefully they can bring down the power on their devices.
- Johnny555 10y agoIf this means that I can stop carrying my 4.5lb laptop to/from work every day, I'm sold. Assuming it has equivalent performance. But somehow I think that the cost of this card plus a home/work dock will be more than the price of 2 laptops.
- new299 10y agoI've started using cheap X220/X230s as my everyday laptops. I leave the HD dock off and just pull the harddrive out to move between laptops. This actually works really really well for me (on Linux).
- pmontra 10y agoInteresting approach. Do you hibernate the system before pulling out the drive or just shutdown and reboot? I wonder if the HD (or SSD?) connectors are designed for thousands of pull/push cycles. How long you've been doing that? I read the review at http://www.notebookreview.com/notebookreview/lenovo-thinkpad-x220-review/ http://www.notebookreview.com/notebookreview/lenovo-thinkpad... and it seems there is a screw in the way to the HD. How fast is it to remove the HD?
- witty_username 10y agoAt least on the laptop I had, the connectors are gold coated pins, so it should be fine.
- new299 10y agoI usually shutdown. Sometimes, I don't even do that. For example if I'm going into a meeting and down need the laptop. I just close the lid and pull the drive (don't really care about the laptop getting stolen, but I do care about my data). I've been doing it for years with no issues. I just leave the screw out.
- lacampbell 10y agoCan I ask what age group you are? I'm really confused that someone would consider carrying 4.5lbs (2kg) an issue, but I am still a long way off from middle age so that may have something to do with it.
- fumar 10y agoI think soon enough a similar device will unlock a new wave of IoT devices. Something, a bit cheaper, much easier to install, and accessible to layman. What if such a device could easily be integrated in a couch, reading table, office chair, door handle, etc. Designers wouldn't need to re-invent X object to include a processing center, it would already exist. I think there is a big opportunity in creating such a easy to use device. I like to think its similar to traditional services that have gone digital or transformed into web services. This would be the next step physical objects gaining digital awareness. I remember when all of a sudden retailers needed to extend their presence into the web. Soon even furniture makers like IKEA will have connected furniture. Why? It will be cheap and easy to implement. There are benefits that we don't consider important today. What if a smart table could keep track of its owners and use, almost like an odometer. Perhaps it could be sold or traded easier. Perhaps this would unlock a new system of trade, if objects could track their use. I wouldn't need to worry about getting a "fair" price or trade if it was more objective. Or a chair monitoring my posture and my couch recording when my dog decided to tear apart its cushion.
- visarga 10y agoWhat purpose would solve adding a CPU to my chair?
- stan_rogers 10y agoIt could have an air of insufferable smugness and sigh with the satisfaction of a job well done. I say that only slightly in jest; this whole "smart connected everything" movement really smacks of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, and that was meant to be dystopian humour, not a promise of a brighter tomorrow.
- noir_lord 10y agoIts 'Snot based development', throw enough at the wall and see what sticks. The only way sometimes is to try the internet connected rabbit hutch and see if there is a market, the strangest things sometimes win.
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- saosebastiao 10y agoI'll never be able to say what I would have chosen to do in the moment, but at least in retrospect, Intel really buffooned their investment in ISA advances by trying to go after the high end server and mainframe market with Itanium, instead of the mobile market. I mean, they were trying to sell incremental advances in top speed to people who were buying 20 year support contracts for IBM mainframes to run their legacy COBOL code. They obviously didn't value faster computers, they wanted stability. Having to recompile was just out of the question. And x86-64 was just the thing to get them to upgrade: they could continue running their same crufty code on the same processors that their new code could run on. The mobile and very low power market, however, will never be taken over by x86. The architecture is just too power hungry, which means batteries need to be large and heavy and more expensive. Phone manufacturers gladly pay premiums for every incremental performance boost, as long as it doesn't consume more power. And the backwards compatibility problem doesn't exist. People throw their phones out every year or two anyway, and nobody has any legacy software they need to keep installed on their new phone. In other words, this market is ripe for ILP, predication, etc., that push off scheduling and branch prediction and other energy hungry tasks onto the compiler. Funny how now they really want into the very low power market, but have abandoned all the ideas that could given them an edge up.
- frozenport 10y agoClaims of the instruction set being power hungry compared to ARM are unsubstantiated. I understand that certain features such virtual memory consume more power, but why does RAX consume more power?
- physguy1123 10y agoA few things: x86 is harder to decode than arm since the instructions are anywhere between 1-15 bytes while arm instructions are 4 bytes each. It has quite an effect if you want to decode more than 1 instruction per cycle. x86 has a stronger memory model than arm, which will come at an extra cost if implementing any sort of out-of-order execution. I'm not very familiar with how it affects the cache implementation. The x86 instruction set is more complicated than arm, and instructions frequently decode into multiple uops. I believe that microcode is used more extensively in x86.
- sigmaprimus 10y agoI couldn't seem to find where to order an evaluation kit. Maybe I'm not looking in the right spot but it seems odd that all they show are drawings and no actual photos or videos.
- Girlang 10y agoWell it's 5mm thick. That's much thicker than a credit card.
- BuuQu9hu 10y agoSounds similar to EOMA, basically the same thing but for ARM: http://elinux.org/Embedded_Open_Modular_Architecture http://elinux.org/Embedded_Open_Modular_Architecture
- deepnotderp 10y agoIf Intel wants the iot market, they need to have better support,documentation and transparency. They also need to reduce costs, but that can be done later... For example,we were going to use an Intel real sense at my startup. But despite claiming that android support was on the way (about two years ago....) we got nothing. As for transparency, real sense runs on non i7 cpus in raw mode but not the sdk. Despite asking (specifically about raw mode)the only response we got was "use i7". Turns out it worked but instead of using Intel chips,we decided to opt for arm+Logitech cameras.
- sandGorgon 10y agowhat is the price point of these devices. In india, we get 1ghz android smartphones with 1gb ram. we have built a few serial controllers using Android COSU mode and android-serial libraries. 3g and wifi are built in obviously. this stuff costs us something like 35$.
- ChuckMcM 10y agoProps for swinging at the fences. I'm not seeing what they were shooting for though. If someone posts the user stories for these things I'd love to see that.
- SunboX 10y agoSo, should we compare this to the Raspberry Pi Compute Module?
- jeppesen-io 10y agoIntel comes up with something cool and interesting. Come here and see top post complaining about it. Not disappointed.
- richardboegli 10y agoSame post a 2 hours before this one.... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13332858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13332858
- rbanffy 10y agoWhen I was working on MAAS for Canonical, one thing I always wanted to build was a small cluster of ethernet PXE-bootable x86 nodes. Sadly, I never managed to get Galileo network-booted and Edison devices I had lacked ethernet ports (and the price of the module is a bit high when compared to desktop-sized boards). The idea of minimum viable computer has always been attractive to me.
- chiph 10y agoWhen I saw the form factor, my first thought was Star Trek's Isolinear chips. If there are standard backplane sizes along with software defined networking, you could scale your compute cluster pretty easily.
- themihai 10y agoI was hopping for a raspberry compute module alternative rather than another PC dongle. Otherwise I would expect some very high specs(i.e thunderbolt, 4k etc) but I think it's not the case either.
- gte525u 10y agoIntel puts out edison (headless) and joule (4k graphics). Those are their linux capable system on module product lines.
- ukd1 10y agoIs this really anything new? Surely the internals of my 2015 MacBook are similar size, once you remove the battery, shell, keyboard, mouse, screen, etc...
- elcct 10y ago> The Ideal Processors That sounds like they just stopped trying... This is sad, because their processors are far from ideal. For example in the area of sound synthesis CPU is still a bottleneck and people have to compromise on the quality or accuracy. I wish AMD could push the boundaries, but in terms of performance they seem to have abandoned the race as well...
- digi_owl 10y agoI seem to recall reading about IBM trying out a concept back in the day that was effectively a dockable HDD that carried the user data. Never been able to find the article again though.
- vollmond 10y agoI'm sure this will eventually apply to phones. I know it's been tried a couple of times (Motorola Atrix, various Kickstarter laptop/desktop phone docks), but one day it will happen. Why should a home user need a whole separate laptop or desktop if they could just have peripherals on their desk and just dock their phone to drive them all? All we really need is a port that can drive all the peripherals at once (we have that on most phones via OTG), the power to run a 1080p display (we have that too, phone displays are usually even higher res than that), and the ability to run common home-use desktop apps (we're getting there, as MS/Google/Apple continue unifying their mobile and desktop OSes). The next step would be to have all that be wireless, which I'm guessing isn't too far away on the Bluetooth roadmap, or even wifi streaming like Chromecast/Nvidia/Steam. I'm sure professional use will lag behind, but even that will catch up eventually, especially with the possibility of docks adding hardware to an existing device (like the better video card in the Surface Book's keyboard module).
- caseysoftware 10y agoWifi or at least connectivity in general is becoming ubiquitous. Assuming connectivity is available, storage is effectively infinite. Power requirements are down and sources are becoming more efficient and plentiful. Processing is becoming cheap, potentially "free" at some point. What happens as a result? What becomes feasible that wasn't 5 or 10 years ago? What problems go away when you have massive amounts of compute capability at the point of the problem?
- diafygi 10y agoDDOS attacks. Seriously. http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/09/botnet-of-145k-cameras-reportedly-deliver-internets-biggest-ddos-ever/ http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/09/botnet-of-145k-camer...
- imaginenore 10y agoThe result is the IoT. Cheap hardware is pretty much a solved problem - you can get Orange Pi PC2 for $20 with very impressive specs, both computational and connectivity-wise. The really hard part is creating new devices and hooking them up to these cheap computers.
- eduren 10y agoI think we'll see an unprecedented expansion of software-in-meatspace. Connectivity combined with compute will be the largest hammer ever made and make so much of business, society, and logistics look like nails. Software will eat the world and I for one have a dizzying amount of excitement and fear.
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- jwatte 10y agoMeanwhile, an ESP 8266 is a couple of bucks and has fine I/O for most "smart" hair brushes and toilet seats. Once you get to fridge scale, a low cost tablet tacked on the front gives me better UI, more security updates, and easier upgrades than anything an OEM would put in.
- elcapitan 10y agoI thought a credit card sized compute platform is called a smartphone?
- cardiffspaceman 10y agoTrue, or _a credit card_, given credit cards have chips too.
- RileyKyeden 10y agoI would have called it Credit Crunch. This is why I don't work in marketing.
- Nano2rad 10y agoIf Intel is interested in developing IoT why did they abandon phone processors? They are both similar.