The Silicon Graybeard

In the World of the High Tech Redneck, the Graybeard is the old guy who earned his gray by making all the mistakes, and tries to keep the young 'uns from repeating them. Silicon Graybeard is my term for an old hardware engineer; a circuit designer. The focus of this blog is on doing things, from radio to home machine shops and making all kinds of things, along with comments from a retired radio engineer, that run from tech, science or space news to economics; from firearms to world events.

Monday, August 31, 2015

A PC That Runs on 5 Watts?

GiadaTech, a company I've never heard of, made a little news with the release of their model F200, a PC that runs on 5W that's aimed at thin client, digital signage, and industrial control applications.

Within its 4.6×4.2×1.2-in. metal chassis, the fanless F200 packs 2 Gbytes of DDR3 DRAM and 8 Gbytes or 16 Gbytes of eMMC flash soldered directly on the board. It requires just 5 W of power at full load, compared to most desktop PCs using 100 W or more.

While clearly not a desktop-class device, compared to hobbyist single board computers like the Raspberry Pi or BeagleBoard, I'd be pretty sure it would hold its own. Based on an Intel Celeron dual core, dual thread processor running at 1.58~2.16GHz, it's capable of running Linux or one of the Android builds, Windows 7 or 8.1.

The basic version is said to list at $110, but there are many options including HDMI video, SIM card for 3G connectivity, mSATA II drive connections for a Solid State Drive. It's supposed to be for sale Real Soon Now: "September of 2015", but apparently not tonight.

2 comments:

drjimAugust 31, 2015 at 11:04 PM
We're using Raspberry Pi's all over the Iowa to do all kinds of neat things, from running the prerecorded messages on the 1-MC, to doing little video kiosk stuff.
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DaveAugust 31, 2015 at 11:30 PM
Runs on 12 VDC so would be perfect for digital Ham Radio applications. RMS Express and Winlink.
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