
Compute Card, a Credit Card-Sized Compute Platform - clumsysmurf
https://newsroom.intel.com/news/intel-unveils-intel-compute-card-credit-card-sized-compute-platform/
======
joezydeco
I 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
Has 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
Never seen an Edison or Curie in the wild.

~~~
69mlgsniperdad
I 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.

~~~
simcop2387
Damn I hadn't heard about that problem with the Quark. What I had heard was
that it was notoriously difficult to get a hold of low level docs so that you
could do anything serious with it (or was that the Curie or Edison?), which
put me off trying their line up because all of the ARM Cortex stuff is pretty
much open compared to them (CMSIS makes a lot of peripherals trivial to deal
with compared to some of the mess that used to exist for ARM).

~~~
makomk
I don't think it was widely reported, but it was kind of a dealbreaker because
it meant that existing x86 code simply wouldn't run and therefore it was
impossible to use standard Linux distros or toolchains on the Quark. Between
that, the difficulty of getting chips, the rather poor performance and power
usage, and the complexity of integrating it, I think it was basically dead on
arrival. The main thing Intel seemed to get out of it was a bunch of very
favourable articles about how they'd be part of the Internet of Things
revolution. The whole thing seemed ill-conceived; it was a 486 going up
against modern RISC designs with predictable results.

------
wonko1
It 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
It'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.

~~~
coldpie
People pay attention to CES? I filter out every news article that pops up in
my feed from that shitshow. "We put a computer in a hair brush!" Fuck off.

~~~
tdkl
Obligatory CES of Shit:
[https://twitter.com/i/moments/817537697535250432](https://twitter.com/i/moments/817537697535250432)

------
owenversteeg
\- 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

~~~
sbierwagen

      Needs 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?

~~~
bengesoff
Maybe the refrigerator is the dock!

~~~
zupa-hu
lol

------
mmastrac
This 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?

~~~
pfarnsworth
I had the same idea about the phone years ago. I don't know why we can't just
take our iPhone or (more likely) Android, plug it into a docking station and
use that at work as a desktop, pick it up and use it as a smartphone, or dock
it to something at home.

~~~
sowpati
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that the idea behind continuum in
Windows 10?

~~~
cylo
That is indeed what continuum is. Right now it's limited by the fact that you
can only run Universal Windows Apps (UWP) that support ARM.

This is exactly why x86-emulation-on-ARM ([http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2016/11/x86-em...](http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2016/11/x86-emulation-rumored-to-be-coming-to-windows-for-arm-in-
late-2017/)) is a very exciting project from Microsoft.

As mobile chips continue to improve, emulating x86 becomes a viable way of
tapping into the huge Windows ecosystem of applications when not running on
battery power.

I think this is Microsoft's last shot of becoming relevant in the mobile
space.

~~~
hyperpallium
Unfortunately, that ecosystem wasn't designed with small touchscreens in mind,
nor battery efficiency...

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Bring your own screen, keyboard, and power supply. Continuum is a weird beast,
I'm not exactly sure who would get something out of it even if app support was
good.

~~~
Joeri
If the phone hardware was more powerful, and the win32 app support was there,
it could replace your PC. You'd have a USB-C dock, with keyboard, screen and
mouse, into which you plug your phone. Your phone is your PC, and when you
leave you take it with you along with all your files and all your software.

You could combine it with something like a nexdock to also turn it into a
laptop. Would be cheaper than getting a phone, and a desktop pc and a laptop,
and it would avoid all those nasty issues with keeping devices in sync.

The qualcomm 820 already performed at core m levels, and the 835 is 25%
faster, so it should be fine if paired with enough ram and storage.

~~~
hyperpallium
Sorry, I wrote GP with an extra thread in mind without referencing it, about
how phones-as-desktops hasn't happened
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13333797](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13333797)

The problem isn't power. Phones have been powerful enough for about 5 years
(since around iPhone 4s, as a means of dating it).

------
saosebastiao
I'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
Claims 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
A 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.

~~~
ch4ck
In reality Intel processors are more power efficient doing something useful
than devices from other vendors.

~~~
digi_owl
I wonder how much that has to do with Intel being a node size ahead of the
pack. That said, i know they have been trying to get away from the notion of
TDP in recent years because they design their CPUs around the concept of "race
to idle". In other words that they try to save power by getting things done
ASAP and then put the CPU to sleep until there is input from the user or
similar.

------
kondro
No 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.

~~~
ryukafalz
>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
There 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
I thought you were talking about the new Macbook Pro.

------
deepnotderp
If 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.

------
sigmar
>\- 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
Per the Ars Technica article someone else posted to HN
([http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/01/intels-compute-
card-i...](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/01/intels-compute-card-is-a-pc-
that-can-fit-in-your-wallet/)), 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-c...](http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/compute-stick/intel-
compute-stick.html)).

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.

~~~
achow
Gizmodo 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...](http://gizmodo.com/intels-incredibly-tiny-compute-card-could-soon-
run-your-1790826525)

~~~
lightedman
The 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.

------
aceperry
Looks 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
If 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.

~~~
lacampbell
Can 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.

~~~
rconti
I wouldn't call it an issue, but it was so freeing when I got the company VPN
client to work on my home machine, and could just leave my laptop at work.
When I leave it there, no more backpack, dongles, other junk.

I still carry it most days, though. And I don't think I'd be a whole lot
happier to carry this thing. I can't really put it in a pocket; not if I
intend on sitting down.

------
ChuckMcM
Props 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.

------
sandGorgon
what 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$.

------
Handwash
I 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
Isn'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.

~~~
dougmwne
Yes, 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-u...](http://www.intowindows.com/4-tools-to-create-windows-to-go-usb-of-
windows-10/)

~~~
BinaryIdiot
I 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.

------
sigmaprimus
I 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.

------
fumar
I 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
What purpose would solve adding a CPU to my chair?

~~~
kweinber
With that device it would run faster than an ARMchair.

~~~
knightofmars
_clap_ _clap clap_ _clap clap clap_ _clap clap clap clap_

------
RileyKyeden
I would have called it Credit Crunch. This is why I don't work in marketing.

------
jwatte
Meanwhile, 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
I thought a credit card sized compute platform is called a smartphone?

~~~
cardiffspaceman
True, or _a credit card_, given credit cards have chips too.

------
caseysoftware
Wifi 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
DDOS attacks.

Seriously.

[http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/09/botnet-
of-145k-camer...](http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/09/botnet-
of-145k-cameras-reportedly-deliver-internets-biggest-ddos-ever/)

------
rbanffy
When 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
When 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.

------
elcct
> 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...

------
themihai
I 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
Intel puts out edison (headless) and joule (4k graphics). Those are their
linux capable system on module product lines.

------
digi_owl
I 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
I'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).

------
SunboX
So, should we compare this to the Raspberry Pi Compute Module?

------
amluto
If 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
Are 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
There is some work afoot to improve the licensing process. I will not develop
for it under the current licensing regime.

------
ukd1
Is this really anything new? Surely the internals of my 2015 MacBook are
similar size, once you remove the battery, shell, keyboard, mouse, screen,
etc...

------
Nano2rad
If Intel is interested in developing IoT why did they abandon phone
processors? They are both similar.

------
jeppesen-io
Intel comes up with something cool and interesting.

Come here and see top post complaining about it. Not disappointed.

------
richardboegli
Same post a 2 hours before this one....
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13332858](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13332858)

------
LyalinDotCom
Any word if it will run Windows IoT or just Linux?

~~~
adav
The BBC Click demo showed it running some variety of Windows 10.

------
BuuQu9hu
Sounds similar to EOMA, basically the same thing but for ARM:

[http://elinux.org/Embedded_Open_Modular_Architecture](http://elinux.org/Embedded_Open_Modular_Architecture)

