Intel's Compute Stick is an entire PC in a $149 HDMI dongle

Scorpus

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Intel has recently been focusing on small form factor computing, whether that's through their range of NUCs, or the latest Core M-powered thin, light and fanless laptops. But one of the smallest devices the company has released so far is their Compute Stick.

The Compute Stick is an entire PC crammed into a small-ish HDMI dongle. Inside you'll find a quad-core Bay Trail Atom processor, 2 GB of RAM and 32 GB of onboard NAND storage. There's also Wi-Fi 802.11n support, as well a Bluetooth and expandable microSD card storage.

As HDMI doesn't really provide enough power to run anything powerful, the Compute Stick needs to be powered by micro-USB. One day Intel hopes that sticks like this could be powered solely by HDMI, but the current HDMI spec doesn't allow this. As the micro-USB port is used for charging, Intel has also included a full-sized USB port on the dongle for accessories and the like.

The version of the Compute Stick that comes with Windows 8.1 with Bing will set you back $149, making it a very affordable option for light computing tasks. A Linux version of the stick will come in at just $89, though the internal hardware has been downgraded to just 1 GB of RAM and 8 GB of storage.

For those that want to buy the Compute Stick, Intel will release it on the market at the end of Q1 2015.

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Cool, let me add more storage and I'll set it up as a home server :) (The linux version ofc)
 
Give it a year or so then you'll be able to play Crysis (3) with it.
so the joke is now: can it run crisis yet? ;)

as more powerful computers are crammed into tiny form factors, I wonder how much processing power does a supercomputer possess in comparison to these.
 
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