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Tuesday, February 4th, 2014
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| 1:00p | ASUS Chromebox: Fanless Haswell in a NUC-like Form Factor, Starting at $179
With hopes of chipping away at the low end Windows PC market, Google enlisted ASUS' help in putting together a small form factor desktop machine running Chrome OS. The result is the ASUS Chromebox, a NUC-like machine running Google's browser based OS. The specs of the ASUS Chromebox are respectable compared to Intel's line of Haswell NUCs. You get your choice of one of three CPUs, all based on Intel's Haswell architecture. There's the Celeron 2955U, Core i3-4010U or the Core i7-4600U. All three options carry the same 15W TDP rating, and the system is apparently fanless (at least the Celeron and Core i3 versions are, waiting for confirmation on the i7). ASUS only plans to offer the Celeron and Core i3 versions in North America. 4K video out is supported on the Core models. Given how well Chrome OS can run on a pair of ARM Cortex A15 cores, I fully expect a 15W Haswell based system to be a great performer.
ASUS' Chromebox comes with a 16GB M.2 SSD, and dual-band 802.11n wireless all for a price starting at $179. Google will throw in 100GB of space on Google Drive for 2 years to make up for the limited internal storage. The box itself is a little bigger than Intel's Haswell NUC, but we're still talking about an extremely small form factor computer. ASUS will ship all units with a VESA mount as well. You can expect availability sometime in March. 
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| 2:36p | 10W Bay Trail-D Coming To Market from GIGABYTE and Biostar
News on the grapevine is filtering down for Bay Trail-D. We have had the 20W Avoton server equivalent processor in our offices for a little while now, but alongside this Intel have 10W consumer based Celerons to market. With the chips being a ball-grid-array arrangement it is up to the motherboard manufacturers to provide the base on which these processors sit. Alongside some display from MSI at CES, GIGABYTE and Biostar are coming to market with their versions. From GIGABYTE, this is the J1800N-D2H, using the 10W Intel Celeron J1800 Bay Trail-D SoC, a dual core Silvermont CPU starting at 2.41 GHz with turbo up to 2.58 GHz. N in the name indicates mini-ITX, and D2H positions the motherboard at the lower end in terms of specifications. The board itself uses a passive heatsink to cool the CPU (more than understandable for 10W), two DDR3L SO-DIMM 1333 MHz slots (1.35V memory only), a D-sub and HDMI audio output, two PS/2 ports, USB 3.0, a USB 2.0 hub, two SATA 3 Gbps ports, a PCIe 2.0 x1 slot, a mini-PCIe slot, Realtek ALC887 audio and Realtek NIC, all in a 17cm square form factor. The Biostar J1800NH is a similar product with the Celeron J1800 SoC, using instead a single DDR3L SO-DIMM slot, fewer USB 2.0 ports and a Realtek ALC662 audio codec instead. What is perhaps more surprising is the pricing. The Biostar motherboard is currently available for $56 with a $60 MSRP – the GIGABYTE motherboard, and the MSI one at CES, should be around $60 as well. However this SoC, sold by Intel, is listed as $72 tray price (i.e. in batches of 1000). This means either that these manufacturers are getting them at a discount, or selling them at a loss. The purpose for Bay Trail-D is tablet like performance in a desktop form factor, with perhaps the added advantage of expandability and connectors. Users wanting quad core solutions will have to keep eyes peeled for J1850/J1900 versions, or jump to Pentium J2850/J2900. We saw that ECS was going to release a line of these motherboards last year. As mentioned, we have Avoton in to test, specifically Intel’s 8-core Silvermont solution for IPC/servers. Keep your eyes peeled for that review. Sources: Fanless Tech via Liliputing via Tech Report.
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