CompuLab has announced a new fanless, small form factor PC called the Utilite. This new PC comes from the same company that engineered the MintBox, MintBox 2, and Fit PC series. The Utilite is a low-power desktop PC powered by a quad core ARM Cortex A9 processor and runs either Ubuntu Linux or Google’s Android operating system.
The upcoming Utilite measures 5.3” x 3.9” x 0.8”(135 x 100 x 21mm) and consumes anywhere between 3W and 8W of power depending on the particular hardware configuration. It is designed to be a quiet desktop replacement with plenty of IO.
CompuLab will provide single core, dual core, and quad core CPU SKUs. Specifically, the Utilite is powered by a Freescale i.MX6 ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore processor that is clocked at up to 1.2 GHz. Users will be able to further configure the system with up to 4GB of DDR3 1066 MHz memory and a 512GB mSATA SSD. Storage can be further expanded using Micro SD-XC cards (maximum of 128GB per card). The GPU in the SoC is compatible with OpenGL ES 1.1 and 2.0 as well as OpenVG 1.1 and OpenCL EP. It is capable of hardware decoding multi-stream 1080p video in a variety of common formats.
Wireless functionality includes an 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi card and Bluetooth 3.0.
The Utilite has a dark gray case with silver front and rear bezels.
The front of the Utilite PC features the following IO options in addition to the power button and indicator LEDs.
- 1 x USB OTG (Micro USB)
- 1 x RS232 (ultra mini serial connector)
- 1 x Micro SD card slot
- 2 x USB 2.0
- 2 x 3.5mm audio jacks (line in, line out)
The rear of the PC hosts:
- 1 x DC power input
- 1 x Wi-Fi antenna
- 1 x RS232 (ultra mini serial connector)
- 2 x USB 2.0
- 2 x Gigabit Ethernet RJ45 jacks
- 2 x HDMI video outputs
According to fanless PC guru FanlessTech, CompuLab will be releasing the ARM-powered Utilite mini PC next month with a starting price of $99 and a variety of SKUs with varying amounts of CPU cores, memory, and storage. The Utilite PC is a bit on the expensive side, but this is a system for industrial and enterprise use as well as consumers, and Olivier from FanlessTech notes that build quality should be on par with those goals/industry aims.
Yeah, I want that crap as
Yeah, I want that crap as much as I wanted the original atom.
Well, maybe for my calculator. I will stick with core for the rest of my stuff.
Could make an interesting
Could make an interesting XBMC/Home Theater box, for the same price as an Apple TV. I’d be interested.
Just the beginning, expect to
Just the beginning, expect to see, in not too much time, more powerfull ARM based products, that will include Nvidia licensed GPU IP, and ARM 64 bit cores! The proliferation of these Linux boxes, is just in its formative stages, there will be ARM/AMD and ARM/Nvidia APU type processors, that will utilize the latest HSA Standards for GPGPU general purpose computation, as well as video encoding! Expect future boxes to contain PCI OCuLink external ports, for an open hardware, lower cost than Thunderbolt, higher speed connection!
I run a MythTV Linux server
I run a MythTV Linux server in a closet and have it wired up to old x86 boxes at each TV. Something like this would be very interesting to me if it had the processing power to play the 1080p videos and stream 1080p from the internet. I’m not sure if the GPU is compatible with the current version of MythTV.
Or how about a pfsense
Or how about a pfsense router/firewall if FreeBSD has drivers that support it?
When I saw the dual LAN, open
When I saw the dual LAN, open source router was the first thought that popped into my head. pfsense or ipfire, though I’m guessing they would have to compile a new version for the arm v9 cpus.
Can’t wait to sell these!
Can’t wait to sell these!
I’ll take 4, of the 4 core
I’ll take 4, of the 4 core models, and build a box with 5 shelves, and a power strip! I’ll LAN them up with gigabit ethernet router on the 5th shelve and and run one ethernet cable outside the box to my laptop! Then I’ll add velcro strapped attatchment points around the bottop space of the box for the power supplies, same for wireing, cover over the sides of the box with open mesh for air flow, leaving the front and back open for access! I’ll set them all up to startup the Blender 3d thin client over the network render farm mode on each, and see how they work as a cheep render farm! Hell, running a Linux multiprosessor OS distro, I could have my own SMP cluster, at a dime store price! Better watch out, Raspberry pi!