Most of the current generation of computer nerds started out writing small programs in languages like BASIC. If you’re in your 30′s, chances are you started out on a Commodore C64, or one of its competitors, and fiddled around with writing small programs. Since then, computing has changed dramatically. Knowing your way around Microsoft Word makes you a “whiz kid” nowadays, and knowing how to install Windows can get you a job.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation is developing a small, inexpensive computer aimed at bringing back the “hacker spirit” from the old days. Starting at a mere $25, the “Raspberry Pi” is a credit card-sized circuit board with an ARM-based SoC (system on a chip), 128 MB of RAM memory and connectors for a display, keyboard and mouse (USB). It uses an SD card as storage, and can be used with a DVI-capable monitor or a TV (composite video). The $35 “Model B” has double the RAM and a wired network port.

Don’t let the low purchase price fool you though. The video above shows an early prototype running Quake III at Full-DH resolution, and while that is not its intended use, it shows that the hardware is quite capable. The CPU is a single core one, running at a mere 700 MHz, but the graphics unit is quite potent, and with some cleverly chosen (written?) software, it should be usable as a general purpose PC.

(image shows a prototype board)

The Foundation is probably right to expect mostly selling the first 10,000 boards to developers and enthusiasts. Like many (current) geeks. I can see tons of applications for this little board. It uses only around 1 watt of power, so it’s perfect for “always-on” type applications like small (NAS?) servers. Plus it plays video really well, so it could also be used to create a Linux-based media player. The sky is the limit . Or rather, 10,000 is the limit. This thing has “EPIC WANT” written all over it, so I’d be surprised if that first batch isn’t sold out in the blink of an eye.

In 2009, I posted a review of the Fit-PC2, the smallest desktop computer available at the time. Since then, CompuLab has released an updated “i” version, and recently the Fit-PC3. That new version is based on a faster AMD chipset, but it’s still an evolutionary update to earlier models. Their latest product however, is something entirely new. An ARM-based desktop computer.

The fast majority of smartphones, tablets and other portable devices out there use ARM processors. Unlike x86 processors like Intel’s Core and Atom series, there chips can’t run Windows (yet, Microsoft is working on this). Intel has recently introduced x86 chips for use in phones, and now CompuLab does the opposite. The “Trim Slice” puts an ARM CPU in a “desktop” computer. I put the word desktop in quotes there because like all CompuLab products, the Trim Slice is tiny. It would easily fit in your shirt’s pocket.

No word yet on which operating systems will work on the Trim Slice, except that there will be more than one option. This makes it hard to think of a use case for this small little box. It has great hardware specs, including HD video playback, and uses almost no power at all (3 watt). It could be a really good media streamer, an Android development system, or even a lightweight Ubuntu desktop. But all that depends on the software.

I have no idea whether Android supports a 24″ non-touchscreen monitor, a USB keyboard and mouse, and if it does, how the resulting setup would “feel”. I’d love to find out, but the current lack of software specifics makes it hard to place this product. It’s a first, but of what exactly?

I’ve been using a Logitech Ultra-X keyboard for a couple of years now, and it’s an abolute delight. But with the wear and tear of daily use, it’ll probably need to be replaced soon. Like with mice, I like wired keyboards. I don’t carry them around, and the wire running across my desk doesn’t bother me. Not enough at least to deal with the hassle and pollution of wireless keyboards that use batteries.

That’s why I love Logitech’s new K750. It has the type of flat, laptop-like keys I like, and is solar-powered. The press release says indoor lighting should be sufficient, and if that turns out to be true, this may well be the ideal combination of wireless freedom and battery-free convenience. Very clever stuff.

Now I realize that somewhere inside this thing there’s a battery. So eventually, when my future K750 is in the state my Ultra-X is in now, it’ll be a little harder to recycle. But at $80, and given Logitech’s track record, I’m expecting it to last for a long time. Now all I need is a motion-powered(?) mouse to go with it.

Remember my review of the world’s smallest ‘desktop’ PC, the Fit-PC2? I recommended it for use as a lightweight, energy efficient server, but apparently you can do much more exciting things with it. Matt Bunting, a University of Arizona electrical engineering senior, used it to power a very cool, spider-like robot. And it turns out Intel just bought two of them to show off the Atom’s potential. It uses other stock parts too, including a Logitech webcam.

Pretty cool, huh? There’s just no beating Atomic spiders…

A little over a year ago, I got myself the cheapest media center PC ever, on the form of an old refurbished office machine. It was fast enough to handle most of what I wanted it to do, but it was lightly too big for my AV setup, and decidedly beige. Ugh. But my main issue with it was that it was also making long hours. The Pentium 4 series of processors is notorious for its high power consumption, and I was starting to feel guilty.

I’ve had a couple of Atom based PCs in my home (a netbook and that really small PC I wrote about earlier), but found them to be slow, especially when it came to graphics. Intel’s ancient 945 chipset was a real bottleneck, and the newer US15W had terrible driver issues in Linux. That’s why I wanted to try nVidia’s Ion chipset. I decided that an ASRock Ion 330 would be the perfect little HTPC for me.

Atom at its best

The first Atom platform had a great new chip that barely used any power at all, combined with an old chipset that used lots of power. That’s why netbook battery life usually isn’t so good. Both nVidia and Intel have since come up with solutions. The Intel US15W is very power efficient, but it’s also still pretty slow. Newer ‘Pinetrail’ Atom processors have a newer GMA3150 integrated into the chip itself. It preforms OK, but also ups the Atoms power consumption. Ion is nVidia’s solution. At roughly the same power levels as the old GMA950, it offers spectacular performance. Even with Pinetrail available, I feel Ion is still the way to go.

Speed

Another thing that I liked about ASRock’s offering is that it uses the dual core N330 processor that does 64 bit. It’s a lot faster than its single core cousins and combined with the speedy Ion graphics this machine feels much more snappy than the average netbook. Ubuntu runs really nicely and is a breeze to set up. It’s fast enough to do some modest video encoding on, and it plays video files flawlessly. I use Boxee‘s new Beta on it, and the image quality is perfect.

Hardware

The Asrock Ion 330 is a small, nondescript black or white box. It’s not particularly pretty, but it’s well-built and offers an optical drive and all the right connectors. There’s HDMI, VGA and six USB ports. It’s being advertized as being very quiet too, but that’s not true. There’s a tiny little fan in there (I’m quessing about 3 cm in diameter) that makes a high-pitched sound. It’s not terrible, but if silence is important to you, you’ll need to replace it with a quieter model.

Pros and cons

• + Low power consumption
• + Perfect video playback through GPU accelleration
• + Small, unobtrusive box
• + Optical drive (Blu-ray optional on newer models)
• + Cheap, and comes without Windows
• - A little noisy
• - Not as faster as a ‘real computer’
• - No front USB, all six are on the back

For me, this is the perfect box to hook up to my TV. I don’t need a tuner (although USB options are available) and I don’t need it to be very fast. It handles my downloads with ease and plays back movies magnificently. All while consuming very little power.

I stumbled across MiserWare MicroMiser a couple of days ago. It promises to shave 10 to 30 percent off your PC’s power consumption, without you even noticing. All you have to do is download and install the program. I have to admit this sounded a little too good to be true at first, but considering how I’m really into low power computing, I decided to sign up for the beta program and give it a try.

Unfortunately, I do not have a reliable way to measure how much power my PC uses. It’s a relatively ‘green’ PC with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor and all the other usual stuff. It probably uses more than 100 watts of power, and it’s on for at least 32 hours each week. Currently, both on my desktop and my laptop, MicroMiser is reporting power savings of over 30%. Those stats are probably a little optimistic, but even if it’s half that, this is a very interesting program. Especially since I’ve noticed absolutely no reduction in my computer’s responsiveness and speed.

I’ve suggested this piece of software to my favorite Dutch hardware review website, hardware.info. One of the things I love about the way they review new hardware is that they consistently test each product’s hunger for power. They have all the neccesary equipment, and the result are can be quite surprising. I hope they decide to test MicroMiser, and I sincerely hope they find it to work. The next step then would be to get everybody to use it.

CompuLab just released a new version of their tiny Fit-PC2, called the Fit-PC2i. My guess is the ‘i’ stands for ‘internet’, because the most interesting new feature is a second gigabit ethernet port. This allows the device to be used as a router or firewall, so it’s not a feature that helps desktop users much. In fact, in order to fit (pun intended) the second RJ45 socket they’ve had to eliminate two USB ports from the back of the device, leaving just two full-size USB ports.

But there’s some good news too. According to the press release, the ‘i’ can be ordered with a 2GHz processor (although not currently listed on the website), and a 2GB memory model is also available. This is more important than you might think, because the RAM chips are soldered onto the motherboard and can not be replaced or upgraded. Also new is an RS232 port on the front of the device.

So, if you’re looking for a tiny little computer with an astonishingly low power consumption and two network connectors, look no further. Be advised though that the current state of the GMA500 graphics driver is still ‘a bloody mess‘, and you’ll need a display with a digital (DVI or HDMI) input.

As I wrote earlier, CompuLab was kind enough to send me a Fit-PC2, so I could find out if this tiny little PC is as great as it sounds on paper. The first unit I received failed before I could properly test it, but it was quickly replaced and I’ve been putting the replacement one through its paces all day today.

On paper

The Fit-PC2 is the world’s smallest fully functional desktop PC. It’s about 1/4 the volume of a Mac Mini, and it still has all the necessary connections and features to be used as a home or office computer. It’s also the most energy efficient PC I know of, using only six watt when idle and eight when playing full resolution HD video (1080p). Yes, it does that. But more about that later.

When Intel launched it’s Atom series of processors, it coupled them with the rather ancient 945G chipset. This combo is inside most netbook and nettop PCs. Not only is the 945 an older chipset, it also uses a lot of energy. More in fact than the Atom chip itself. Basically, it let the Atom both down in terms of energy efficiency and performance. nVidia’s ION platform proved that it was possible to create a much more powerful chipset without needing extra juice. The US15W chipset found in the Fit-PC2 however is extremely energy efficient. It tops out at 2.3 watts, less even than the CPU.

Specs
My review unit was a ‘fit-PC2 Linux’ with the following specs. It retails for $359 when ordered directly from CompuLab.

Hardware

The first thing I noticed about these specs is that Intel made some rather curious choices when designing the US15W chipset. There are cutting edge features like gigabit LAN, but at the same time you have to connect the hard drive using parallel ATA. Why Intel chose not to include the newer, faster SATA standard is beyond me. CompuLab has solved some of the practical implications of this omission by integrating a bridge adapter, but that still means hard drives won’t run at SATA speeds.

The only noise the Fit-PC2 makes comes from the hard drive. There’s a diskless version available, and if you were to add an SDD drive you’d end up with a completely silent system. SSD prices are dropping daily, so I may well end up swapping the 160 GB 2.5″ hard drive for one with no moving parts.

Because the CPU and chipset are not actively cooled (in fact the case functions as a heatsink), the Fit-PC2 can run quite hot. I’ve been assured by the people at CompuLab that 50 degrees (C) is normal, and that’s about how hot mine gets.

Form factor trade-offs

Because the Fit-PC2 is only 11.5 mm wide and 27 high, there’s very little room for connectors. This is probably why CompuLab opted for a much smaller HDMI connector even though the signal is actually DVI. Because of this, there’s no analog signal which in turn means you can only connect a screen with a DVI or HDMI connector. A HDMI to DVI adapter is supplied with the computer.

There’s also no audio over the HDMI output. There are analog line-in, out and microphone connectors, but digital audio is a no-go. This seriously limits the product’s potential as a home theater PC.

I’d also have liked the front USB connectors to be full size instead of mini-USB. This way you need an adapter cable to connect things like thumb drives.

US15W and Linux

The Poulsbo chipset includes an Intel GMA500 graphics processor, and it is what I was most curious about when testing this machine. The model number might suggest it to be a slower version of the GMA900, but in fact it’s an entirely different graphics core, PowerVR SGX, licensed from a company called Imagination Technologies. I wanted to see if it could keep up with the GMA900 in my Asus 901 netbook. Perhaps it’d even do better.

Intel has been known to support the Linux community by providing the details necessary to write display drivers. As a result, Intel’s integrated GPUs are a great option for Linux users with modest graphics needs. Unfortunately, because it’s not a true Intel product, this doesn’t apply to the GMA500. The current state of Linux drivers for the Poulsbo chipset has rightfully been described as ‘a mess‘. There is a driver available for some Linux distributions, but it does not work with the latest kernels. For Ubuntu, this means you’re stuck using 8.04. And I have to admit that after using 9.04 for a while now that feels like a major step backwards.

Another thing there simply wasn’t any room for in the Fit-PC2 was RAM sockets. It’s got 1 GB of memory soldered right onto the motherboard, and there’s no way to add extra RAM.

Test setup

To see how fast this machine was I ran a series of test on three machines I own. All of them run Ubuntu Linux, and all were fully up-to-date at the time of testing. I realize that this is a rather random collection of hardware configurations, but it’s the best I could do.

Benchmark results

1080p HD video playback

Flash video
Flash is notoriously slow on Linux, and the Atom isn’t the fastest processor available. Watching Flash-based YouTube videos is an integral part of the web browsing experience for many, and something a nettop PC should be able to handle with ease.

All three machines played both standard and high quality videos without issues, but going to fullscreen mode as too much to ask, as was playing YouTube’s new HD format. Faster machines may me able to accomplish this, but there’s a lot of work to be done by Adobe before Flash video plays as smoothly on Linux as it does on Windows.

Flash preformance
To further test Flash performance I wrote a little movie (which can be found here) that animates 700 movie clips in mathematical patterns. Animating this many objects is hard work for Flash player. The movie calculates a score after the first 1000 frames.

This is the only benchmark I ran where the Eee-PC beat the Fit-PC2. I ran the tests several times to see if there was some sort of glitch, but the results were consistent. This probably means that the 2D part of the GMA500 core is a little slower than that of the GMA950. There are very few real world scenarios where Flash would draw this much into the screen though, so I doubt if anyone will ever notice.

Other benchmarks
Using Phoronix Test Suite, I ran a couple of other benchmarks to further measure performance.

I was quite surprised to see the Fit-PC2 win the 3D gaming benchmark, especially considering how little power it uses. the game ran noticably smoother on this tiny little box than it did on the Asus and the Fujitsu-Siemens. 19 frames per second may not be enough to actually play this particular game, but it does show that the GMA500 is a little more potent than its model number suggests.

Both the FFmpeg and POV-Ray benchmark give an indication of how fast the CPU is, and it’s clear that a single core Atom is no match for even an aging Pentium IV. The P4 may run very hot and use tons of energy, it did manage to beat both Atoms by a comfortable margin.

Conclusion

CompuLab promotes the Fit-PC2 as a ‘new type of home theater PC’. Well, I’m not convinced that’s what it’s ideally suited for. It does play HD video really well, it’s quiet and it has DVI out. But there’s no TV tuner, and the Atom is seriously slow when it comes to transcoding video. I haven’t been able to try things like Boxee or even Windows Media Center, but I doubt running either on this machine will be much fun. Microsoft lists a 1.6 GHz processor in their hardware requirements, but I doubt they mean the Atom.

So, is this a bad machine then? By no means. It’s an amazing engineering feat, and because it uses less power than even the average router you can leave it on all day without worrying about your electricity bill or the environment. I’d highly recommend this as a download machine or a lightweight home server. Simply put it somewhere out of sight and have it handle your torrents. Or you can attach an external hard drive and use it to store (backups of) your files.

And if you’re running a business it may be worth considering that these machines pay for themselves. If I’d replace my current desktop PC with a Fit-PC2 it would save around $100/year on my utilities bill. It’ll run office software with ease, and general performance under Ubuntu was on par with the Eee-PC.

This blog has been doing quite well lately, and as a result of having visitor numbers I never imagined I would, people have been offering me stuff to review. I’ve declined most of these offers. I feel bad writing about things I wouldn’t normally get excited about. But when I saw this little machine pop up on Engadget, I couldn’t help myself. I just had to see if they’d send me a review unit. So I contacted Compulab, and sure enough they did.

The Fit-PC2 is the world’s smallest fully functional desktop PC. The original Fit-PC had a slow 500 MHz AMD Geode processor, but its successor is based on Intel’s Atom line of CPU’s and thus much quicker. I’ll have to get back to you about things like performance. I’ll do a full review this week. But I wanted to let you see how really tiny this computer is. Even the package it came in was tiny. I couldn’t help but chuckle when the UPS guy handed it to me.

This was the first time I’ve had to use my camera’s macro setting to take snapshots of a computer. Perhaps I shouldn’t have, because just like in all the press shots I’ve seen of it it looks bigger than it actually is.

Here’s the Fit-PC alongside my already tiny Asus Eee-PC 901. The wifi antenna should help give you a feel for the dimensions.

Stay tuned for my review later this week.

At Computex, nVidia is keen to show off it Ion and Tegra product lines. Ion is a new chipset that turns Intel’s Atom processor into a multimedia powerhouse by adding a proper GPU. The first products are available and have been met with critical acclaim. But I find Tegra a much more interesting product. Not in the sense that I’m going to run to stores when the first Tegra-packing devices hit retail, but in the sense that I’m curious to see where this is going.

Tegra is a system-on-a-chip that uses an ARM processor and an nVidia graphics core. It’s aimed at portable devices ranging from phones to netbooks. There are a lot of demo videos out there that show off the 3D and video playback capabilities of this combo, but I can’t help but wonder how I’m ever going to use a Tegra device.

Operating systems

An ARM processor is fundamentally different from ‘normal’ x86 ones, which means none of the world’s major operating systems will run on it. Even Ubuntu’s MID edition targets other hardware. For now, this seems to leave Windows CE, an ancient Microsoft product that I thought had vanished altogether. Will that even run a current browser? That’s the very least I’d want it to do.

HD video is great, but how about work?

Also at Computex, Adobe, nVidia and Broadcom annouced that they’re working on hardware acceleration for Flash video. Tegra will support this new technology alongside its other HD and 3D features. While this is truly great, it simply adds a new trick to the list of things it can offload to the graphics core. But when I’m done watching the video, how snappy will my email client be? Will the 750 MHz processor slow everything else to a crawl?

Pros

There’s one thing I really really like about Tegra. Depending on the exact version of the chip it uses between half a watt(!) and four watt under full load. When performing generic tasks it apparently uses 50 mW. I’ve written about low power computing before, and Tegra could definitely be a major player in that field.

And hey, Hardware accelerated 1080p, Flash video and 3D are all great things to have. Don’t get me wrong.

Alternatives?

The Tegra chip that’s most likely to end up in netbooks and nettops is the 650, which uses up to 4 watts of power. This puts it in direct competition with Intel’s US15W chipset, which is x86. When combined with an Atom Z530, a complete PC based on this chipset uses only 8 watts, and that’s while playing back 1080p video. The number also includes the power used by the hard disk and memory. I hope to be able to write about that machine in the near future, and I’m curious how it would compare to Tegra. Perhaps then I’d get a feel for what makes Tegra special.

UPDATE: Gizmodo just posted a great post about low power computing platforms. It points out that Tegra is commonly associated with Windows Mobile (bummer) and it includes the similar Snapdragon platform. I knew so little about that I felt uncomfortable including it in my post. But from what I read it looks like a very interesting offering too.