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"Primarily for digital signage" It has a core i3 cpu, 4Gb RAM and will have USB3 and thunderbolt. Perhaps I'm out of touch - but since when does a moving sign

"Primarily for digital signage" It has a core i3 cpu, 4Gb RAM and will have USB3 and thunderbolt. Perhaps I'm out of touch - but since when does a moving sign display need gigaflops? Wouldn't a Raspberry pi for 1/20 of the cost, and which can drive a full HD video, be sufficient?

kenrikm 14y ago
+1 I made almost the same comment. Raspberry Pi can do 1080p and since most digital signage systems are just running on web technology it can more then handle the load.
swalsh 14y ago
Imagine you're a clothing company, you get a 60" monitor and hook it up in a mall. Then you take one of these PC's connect a HD camera to it, then proceed to perform some image processing on the picture in real time. As a person walks past the monitor show them walking, but replace their cloths with the companies cloths. That would catch my attention.
- jmsduran 14y ago
  An interesting idea, but I can imagine that under realistic constraints such a solution would look rather tacky, unless the person was standing completely still.
  - Estragon 14y ago
    With two or three cameras and a much beefier processor you could probably do a pretty good job.
    - planetguy 14y ago
      If anyone wants to actually make that work, I reckon you'd have customers out the wazoo.
- minikomi 14y ago
  This exists at the Lacoste store in Shibuya. Also, this is pretty cool: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_tkYCtIMOc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_tkYCtIMOc
- linh 14y ago
  Oh wow. This is funny. I know someone who spent 2-3 years developing the technology for his phd (it's pretty complex to get it right/good). Anyway, the fashion industry is a pretty conservative industry (weird huh?) so he has a hard time monetizing it even though it has a lot of potential.
throwaway54-762 14y ago
But can your ARM Raspberry Pi run Windows 3.1 or whatever x86 OS your business's legacy signage program runs on?
- excuse-me 14y ago
  The signage program is almost certainly displaying html or video.
  - MichaelGG 14y ago
    ... or Flash. I've seen plenty of displays and whatnot that display horribly choppily. The image is exceedingly sharp, almost certainly vector based (not video), and the animation is extremely rich and complicated (almost certainly not HTML).
underwater 14y ago
I've seen a lot of signage that runs on Flash. This is probably because that's what designers use, and also because new adverts are delivered over slow connections (GPRS?) At any rate, the $400 cost would be minuscule compared to the cost of the screen itself, housing and installation costs. Why try and save a little money and risk having to retrofit or replace the displays in a few years when socially integrated, augmented reality, realtime 3D ads are in vogue.
- seanalltogether 14y ago
  Correct. All the digital signage I've worked on in the past couple years was Flash/AIR based.
- JoelSutherland 14y ago
  I'm now seeing some HTML5 stuff. Certainly having an Ivy Bridge i3 available for $400 will accelerate that trend.
- minikomi 14y ago
  Slightly off topic.. There was one day here in Tokyo where the feed for the JR signs had somehow broken, and the "train approaching" LED banners here and there were showing a lovely mess of mangled XML.
hollerith 14y ago
future versions will have usb3 and thunderbolt. this version has only usb2 and hdmi.
roc 14y ago
> "Wouldn't a Raspberry pi for 1/20 of the cost, and which can drive a full HD video, be sufficient?" Not for arbitrary arrays of potentially-disparate displays -- which is where a lot of signage software is going/has gone (being able to marry varying display technologies, resolutions, dpi, etc). While they likely don't need to wring every last flop out of an i5, they do need to be capable of substantially more than driving canned video to a single HD display. And the more displays an off-the-shelf unit can drive, the cheaper/easier installation and expansion becomes.
qq66 14y ago
The CPU is such a small fraction of the total cost of digital signage (primary costs are the display, the space rental, and the service) that it hardly matters whether they overspec the CPU.
- astrodust 14y ago
  Exactly. Saving potentially 50W on the CPU seems almost meaningless when the signs themselves will be several hundred W each.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
"... since when does a moving sign display need gigaflops?" It doesn't of course. The argument Intel makes is the same one they have made in the past which is "here is a box your generic engineer can program that is cheap enough to run a sign." The argument is based on a time/cost to market one. Lets assume you make 1,000 digital signs, and the total cost to the end customer is $10,000 per sign. So you have $10M in potential (but unrealized) revenue sitting there. You can either spend a year developing the software for this sign using an expensive embedded systems programmer for a year at $150,000, or you can spend two months developing the software with a cut-n-paste coder fresh out of college (annual salary $45K so 2 months is $7,500. So your RaPi solution costs $50 each (when you include a case and cables) vs $400 each. So over 1,000 signs that is $350,000 in 'parts' cost extra to use the Intel solution but you also save $142,500 in labor costs, and you are in the market 10 months earlier. So is that time to market advantage (and the cheaper programmer) a win or not? And since you're looking at $10M in revenue $142,500 is about 1.5% of your margin your giving up. And finally there is the point that if you do decide to make digital signs out of RaPi's and you can't get the crappy blob-of-bits Broadcom tosses in for their GPU control what are your options? You've got a volume of 10,000 and Broadcom could care less. With Intel they will, with proper documentation, give you every piece of information you need, they already have the support team in place to support their huge OEM business. When you come at the problem that way it looks a bit different.
- excuse-me 14y ago
  True, although with the Intel box you also have PSU, cooling and cabling and you find that multi-headed video cards and distribution cables to drive lots of display end up costing far more than putting a single board Linux box in the back of each TV. But the real argument against a Wintel sign is to head over to thedailywtf.com any day and see pictures giant billboards showing BSOD or asking for a driver
  - ajross 14y ago
    Seems like that second point is about the "win" part. Surely a PC board is going to have much better support running Linux than an ARM SoC. The linked article is about hardware, not windows. The first can be true or not. There are Intel PC boards available at all price ranges down to $80 or so. It's only the very bottom of the SoC range (i.e. the Raspberry Pi, a system so bleeding edge you still can't actually buy one anywhere) where you start to see price competition.
bitwize 14y ago
When they started running Windows. And they started running Windows because the industry demanded it. Easier to program and whatnot.

kenrikm 14y ago

+1 I made almost the same comment. Raspberry Pi can do 1080p and since most digital signage systems are just running on web technology it can more then handle the load.

swalsh 14y ago

Imagine you're a clothing company, you get a 60" monitor and hook it up in a mall. Then you take one of these PC's connect a HD camera to it, then proceed to perform some image processing on the picture in real time. As a person walks past the monitor show them walking, but replace their cloths with the companies cloths. That would catch my attention.

jmsduran 14y ago
An interesting idea, but I can imagine that under realistic constraints such a solution would look rather tacky, unless the person was standing completely still.
- Estragon 14y ago
  With two or three cameras and a much beefier processor you could probably do a pretty good job.
  - planetguy 14y ago
    If anyone wants to actually make that work, I reckon you'd have customers out the wazoo.
minikomi 14y ago
This exists at the Lacoste store in Shibuya. Also, this is pretty cool: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_tkYCtIMOc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_tkYCtIMOc
linh 14y ago
Oh wow. This is funny. I know someone who spent 2-3 years developing the technology for his phd (it's pretty complex to get it right/good). Anyway, the fashion industry is a pretty conservative industry (weird huh?) so he has a hard time monetizing it even though it has a lot of potential.

throwaway54-762 14y ago

But can your ARM Raspberry Pi run Windows 3.1 or whatever x86 OS your business's legacy signage program runs on?

excuse-me 14y ago
The signage program is almost certainly displaying html or video.
- MichaelGG 14y ago
  ... or Flash. I've seen plenty of displays and whatnot that display horribly choppily. The image is exceedingly sharp, almost certainly vector based (not video), and the animation is extremely rich and complicated (almost certainly not HTML).

underwater 14y ago

I've seen a lot of signage that runs on Flash. This is probably because that's what designers use, and also because new adverts are delivered over slow connections (GPRS?) At any rate, the $400 cost would be minuscule compared to the cost of the screen itself, housing and installation costs. Why try and save a little money and risk having to retrofit or replace the displays in a few years when socially integrated, augmented reality, realtime 3D ads are in vogue.

seanalltogether 14y ago
Correct. All the digital signage I've worked on in the past couple years was Flash/AIR based.
JoelSutherland 14y ago
I'm now seeing some HTML5 stuff. Certainly having an Ivy Bridge i3 available for $400 will accelerate that trend.
minikomi 14y ago
Slightly off topic.. There was one day here in Tokyo where the feed for the JR signs had somehow broken, and the "train approaching" LED banners here and there were showing a lovely mess of mangled XML.

hollerith 14y ago

future versions will have usb3 and thunderbolt. this version has only usb2 and hdmi.

roc 14y ago

> "Wouldn't a Raspberry pi for 1/20 of the cost, and which can drive a full HD video, be sufficient?" Not for arbitrary arrays of potentially-disparate displays -- which is where a lot of signage software is going/has gone (being able to marry varying display technologies, resolutions, dpi, etc). While they likely don't need to wring every last flop out of an i5, they do need to be capable of substantially more than driving canned video to a single HD display. And the more displays an off-the-shelf unit can drive, the cheaper/easier installation and expansion becomes.

qq66 14y ago

The CPU is such a small fraction of the total cost of digital signage (primary costs are the display, the space rental, and the service) that it hardly matters whether they overspec the CPU.

astrodust 14y ago
Exactly. Saving potentially 50W on the CPU seems almost meaningless when the signs themselves will be several hundred W each.

ChuckMcM 14y ago

"... since when does a moving sign display need gigaflops?" It doesn't of course. The argument Intel makes is the same one they have made in the past which is "here is a box your generic engineer can program that is cheap enough to run a sign." The argument is based on a time/cost to market one. Lets assume you make 1,000 digital signs, and the total cost to the end customer is $10,000 per sign. So you have $10M in potential (but unrealized) revenue sitting there. You can either spend a year developing the software for this sign using an expensive embedded systems programmer for a year at $150,000, or you can spend two months developing the software with a cut-n-paste coder fresh out of college (annual salary $45K so 2 months is $7,500. So your RaPi solution costs $50 each (when you include a case and cables) vs $400 each. So over 1,000 signs that is $350,000 in 'parts' cost extra to use the Intel solution but you also save $142,500 in labor costs, and you are in the market 10 months earlier. So is that time to market advantage (and the cheaper programmer) a win or not? And since you're looking at $10M in revenue $142,500 is about 1.5% of your margin your giving up. And finally there is the point that if you do decide to make digital signs out of RaPi's and you can't get the crappy blob-of-bits Broadcom tosses in for their GPU control what are your options? You've got a volume of 10,000 and Broadcom could care less. With Intel they will, with proper documentation, give you every piece of information you need, they already have the support team in place to support their huge OEM business. When you come at the problem that way it looks a bit different.

excuse-me 14y ago
True, although with the Intel box you also have PSU, cooling and cabling and you find that multi-headed video cards and distribution cables to drive lots of display end up costing far more than putting a single board Linux box in the back of each TV. But the real argument against a Wintel sign is to head over to thedailywtf.com any day and see pictures giant billboards showing BSOD or asking for a driver
- ajross 14y ago
  Seems like that second point is about the "win" part. Surely a PC board is going to have much better support running Linux than an ARM SoC. The linked article is about hardware, not windows. The first can be true or not. There are Intel PC boards available at all price ranges down to $80 or so. It's only the very bottom of the SoC range (i.e. the Raspberry Pi, a system so bleeding edge you still can't actually buy one anywhere) where you start to see price competition.

bitwize 14y ago

When they started running Windows. And they started running Windows because the industry demanded it. Easier to program and whatnot.