5 ms·
Wow, is it just me or is Intel missing the market on this one? The price is about 4x too high for what you get (compared to other ARM based boards) and the siz
by jzawodn 13y ago
Wow, is it just me or is Intel missing the market on this one? The price is about 4x too high for what you get (compared to other ARM based boards) and the size is a little big as well.
Who is this really aimed at, anyway?
- shawabawa3 13y agoMy guess is schools and universities, who will buy in bulk at massive discounts.
- yitchelle 13y agoOK, why are they discriminating the rest of the maker, hacker, tinker, population by pricing it so high? They need to take a page of the play book from one of the ARM board folks.
- rjsw 13y agoYeah, why buy an x86 board with an undocumented GPU when there are plenty of ARM boards with undocumented GPUs available.
- mjolk 13y agoI think the fact that it's an x86 board makes it an attractive first step from Intel into the super-small form factor market -- not that I'd buy an Atom-based snail when I already have a Raspberry-pi turtle at home.
- Arnor 13y agoApparently their market is developers who don't own computers: > However, the MinnowBoard is still cheaper than most PCs and could appeal to developers looking to write and test commercial applications before they're deployed in servers, embedded devices and other computers. I'm baffled as to why anyone would purchase this board. Raspberry Pi[1] destroys it on price/value so _will_ Parallella[2]. Why not wait a couple months and get a super computer![3] [1] http://www.raspberrypi.org/ http://www.raspberrypi.org/ [2] http://www.parallella.org/ http://www.parallella.org/ [3] Why do I think anyone here needs these links?
- walshemj 13y agolets be honest the number of "developers" who can't afford a proper PC is trivial in the USA just buy a newish pc second hand one ebay.
- yitchelle 13y agoAre these "PC" only for sale in the US?
- astrodust 13y agoYou could probably find a computer better than this in the trash, some old Pentium 4 with 2GB of memory.
- Someone 13y agoUnless you want something more power efficient. http://www.minnowboard.org/static/pdfs/Getting%20Started%20with%20the%20Minnowboard.pdf http://www.minnowboard.org/static/pdfs/Getting%20Started%20w... says this runs from 5V, 2.5A. That's 12.5W. Quite a lot for mobile, but a Pentium 4 CPU alone will use at least four times that (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CPU_power_dissipation_figures#Pentium_4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CPU_power_dissipation_f...), for a < 2GHz variant.
- yareally 13y ago> However, the MinnowBoard is still cheaper than most PCs and could appeal to developers looking to write and test commercial applications before they're deployed in servers, embedded devices and other computers. Relying on having spare computers for testing is also kind of a thing of the past in the age of cheap PC resources and virtual machines. I gave up keeping old computers around for software testing 5-6 years ago when I bought my first 4 core CPU. Also keeps my work area from getting really really hot in the summer.
- sciurus 13y agoSee zenlinux's comment below. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6134854 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6134854
- chipsy 13y agoThey might not be cost-competitive. Intel's process advantage comes from vertical integration. But it also means that they need to keep pushing out high-margin flagship products to support their scale of operations and technology advantage. A niche thing like this is likely to get thrown under the bus internally, but they can't ignore the pressure from below and the deteriorating PC market anymore. In contrast, the ARM ecosystem has flexibility to mix and match the design, manufacturing and marketing amongst a group of companies. This is why a lot of people are confident about ARM's fortunes in coming years; the business model favors them in a "cheaper is better" computing market.