News - Intel’s new ultra compact form factor - the 10cm square NUC

[HEXUS]

Raspberry Pi and Mac Mini offspring?

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[boryssts]

"The NUC will feature Thunderbolt connectivity, 2 x mini PCIe headers, 2 x SODIMM slots, HDI and USB 3.0." what's HDI ?

[shaithis]

I really cannot see how they could even remotely compete on price......unless of course they aim in squarely at applications that RasPi cannot handle.

[Terbinator]

Unless you can set it to boot from LAN/from a NAS then storage just get up and running is going to be very expensive as you'd have to go the mini-PCi-e SSD route, no?

[Roobubba]

Did you write this article in a hurry?! Honestly, I'm not sure what place 'IMHO' has in an article like this.

IMHO

[TheAnimus]

Can't see why this would be compared to a mac mini.

Surely compare it to Pico ITX (Not just Mini!) as Pico ITX is also 10CM, however it is 7.2cm on the other side, so smaller.

I think they have to compete on price, and also pack much more of a punch.

[shaithis]

Unless you can set it to boot from LAN/from a NAS then storage just get up and running is going to be very expensive as you'd have to go the mini-PCi-e SSD route, no?

Or USB flash drive.

[crossy]

Unless you can set it to boot from LAN/from a NAS then storage just get up and running is going to be very expensive as you'd have to go the mini-PCi-e SSD route, no?

If it's got Thunderbolt then you can use one of those external RAID boxes from LaCie and others. Ah, £240 for 2x500MB, I see what you mean. Of course, there's always plenty of mPCIe-to-SATA adaptors - like the StarTech.com one I saw recently, £32 for two SATAII ports.

I’d hope it gets to the general market at a good price and then it would make an excellent under TV Wintel box, but having Windows installed on it would add a lot

Saddling a cheap board (??) like this with (expensive) Windows would be really dumb (imho). Far better to slap some kind of open source OS on it - xBSD, a Linux distro, etc.

I was curious about this one - looks like a more modern version of the old Nano-ITX boards. As it stands, the lack of direct storage capabilities (as said by Terbinator) shout "cluster compute node" to me. If I was going to use it then I'm going to have to budget for a SATA card to slap into it.

[Arthran]

Saddling a cheap board (??)

By reports i've seen the board will be close to £100, without a cpu. No way that can be called cheap even with the lowest of i3's. Mini itx all the way down to pico ITX have been doing this for a long time, this is simply intel trying to ride the fact that the raspberry Pi cant be made fast enough!

[crossy]

By reports i've seen the board will be close to £100, without a cpu. No way that can be called cheap even with the lowest of i3's. Mini itx all the way down to pico ITX have been doing this for a long time, this is simply intel trying to ride the fact that the raspberry Pi cant be made fast enough!

Hmm, agree. Bareboard cost ~£100 = FAIL (to use ElRegSpeak) in my book, since there's so much else available at that price with more functionality in the Mini-ITX size - including stuff from Intel! Although I'm obviously not cynical enough to think this Intel announcement is merely them trying to jump on the RPi hype wagon.

[Terbinator]

Or USB flash drive.

Ah, missed that part.

If it's got Thunderbolt then you can use one of those external RAID boxes from LaCie and others. Ah, £240 for 2x500MB, I see what you mean. Of course, there's always plenty of mPCIe-to-SATA adaptors - like the StarTech.com one I saw recently, £32 for two SATAII ports.

But there is still nowhere to put a HDD inside the box - where as a mini-PCI-e SSd slots straight in.

[DDY]

I think the CPU is soldered on to the board, I can't imagine that size of PCB accommodating a socket of any kind hence a CPU must be included, I expect £100 to include a soldered on mobile i3 of sorts. Also, the apparent lack of SATA ports could suggest that one of the mini PCIe slots is in fact an mSATA slot.

I don't think this board necessarily competes with the RaPi or the Mac Mini, while it does a lot of what the RaPi and Mac can do I think it's targeted to a different market. I see it as a long overdue upgrade to the embedded boards that are commonly used in kiosks, automation equipment, PVRs, display boards etc. For a long time the x86 embedded market has been making do with slower CPUs from VIA and Intel's Atom. I guess now that can change and we'll start seeing things like interactive displays which aren't limited slide shows and 2D graphics and PVRs which have fancy 3D tiled content screens or whatever.

[davesom555]

Good choice for car infotainment!

[BerZerk]

Size does matter after all

[phili_c51]

as its powered by intel i'm assuming x86 architecture? Still cant see a place in the market for this

[13thmonkey]

where is the CPU? I can't see a socket or even the pin pattern for one.