Intel's NUC - Next Unit of Computing

What is ME?

I wasn't enthusiastic about that fact either. I try to look at the hardware first before taking the manufacturing location into account.

Intel's plan is working out as it seems.

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Get out of here, you thoughtless, worthless newfag. People like you are why imageboards in general are going to shit.

ARM Cortex-A7 is cheap and much less buggy. About the only thing it can't run are the modern video games, but hell you can just use emulators and play much better games.

and has worse IPC
and is only 32-bit
and doesn't support out-of-order execution inb4 that's suddenly a bad thing because everyone fucking implemented it wrong

ME is incredibly useful. There is a reason they are on CPUs. People actually use them when managing many machines. Turns out most of the world is not freetards and opensourcing it would only help AMD fuck them over.

This
Besides. AMD and ARM processors use ARM Trusted Firmware (TrustZone) which is exactly the same thing and runs a similar microkernel system

It has no business of existing on private computers which aren't subject to company control.

The business case for it existing is that it is much cheaper to fabricate all chips with ME and simply not use it than it is to design two different versions of all chips with and without ME.

There's 64-bit ARM boards too, if you really need it (I don't).

ME might be useful for sysadmin, but that doesn't mean it needs to be shoved down everyone's throat. My PC doesn't need it, and I don't want it.

You can buy ARM boards that don't require non-free firmware to boot, and without jumping through hoops and taking the risk of bricking your system with trannyboot.

Then they should give out the source code to all their firmware and also the method that cianiggers use to flip the bit that turnss off ME on their systems. Funny thing how they don't want to eat the dogfood they impose on everyone else, isn't it?

Attached: TAD.png (500x500, 328.19K)

Yeah it really sucks that one tiny piece of the system is proprietary when the entire rest of the massive other components are also proprietary. You guys flip out about the weirdest shit.

The other hardware doesn't run with such high priority that the OS itself can't contain it. Well except for some thing that use DMA, like USB 3. But you can easily avoid using that hardware, whereas you can't avoid using the CPU.

From what I can see they use components which have open source drivers.

Not an argument. If somehow military and spooks can disable it (at least since the HAP bit is present), why not disable it too on machines destined for mainstream (i.e. not business/corporate where AMT might actually be used) sale? Clearly the motivation is not a business one.

The military and top secret government agencies pay extra money to get custom ordered products. You too can make custom orders directly from Intel if you're planning to buy millions of dollars of CPU from them.

more like /g/ poster

Intel already showed themselves to be conniving, lying bastards who make the most buggy hardware in existence. Nobody halfway sane is going to want to pay them even one red cent. In fact, they should be refunding everyone the cost of the chips they bought. What's really needed is a major class action lawsuit that puts them out of business once and for all. Then we can kill the shitty x86 disaster of an architecture and move on finally.

Bullshit. The multi billion transistor CPU can do whatever the fuck it wants and you have no way of auditing it. The CPU is not the management engine.

These boxes are loud, that's the main issue. They all have notebook-type blowing fans that whirls all day long. Second, Intel's branded hardware is known to be overpriced, they cost twice as much as noname-branded Chinese fanless boxes with exact same internals. They all come barebone, so you'll have to buy SSD, HDD, memory and wireless card.
If you need a portable PC, you're better off going for similarly-specced laptop, if it's desktop aesthetics, look into MiniITX, if HTPC or NAS, just go for Goldmont motherboards, you don't need an i5 to play animes.
As for liberty: besides proprietary UEFI implementations, non-free microcode and firmware for CPU to boot, latest generation Intel GPUs also need non-free firmware to function properly. Yes, they will run Trisquel or whatever antelope-approved snowflake distribution of Linux kernel and stallmanite parasite attached to it in headless mode, don't even expect the best GPU performance with libre driver. But if you treat the proprietary firmware (that never gets executed on main system memory or processor cores) as part of the hardware, you'll be able to escape mental loophole of freetardism pushing the Overton's window even further perhaps.

You're not even consistent in your posts. Now all of a sudden you just changed the suject to:
But before you were were talking about:
Well guess what, I don't use a GPU and never did. So that leaves only microcontrollers, and those are standard parts with (shitty proprietary code) rather than the massive shits you're alluding to.
Get a grip instead of jumping around and making so many assumptions about how other people do their computing.

Intel NUCs seem overpriced. These miniPCs are cute though. What I'd like to see is a similar AMD-based product. I'm hoping for one with a 7nm Ryzen 3200ge sometime next year. I'd buy that.

Well, Atari is making a mini PC with AMD CPU. Unfortunately, it won't be the latest Ryzen series. Will be available for pre-ordering on 30th at 200$.

This will never happen while people choose to remain addicted to their precious proprietary software. I predict that the world will continue to insist on using Windows to support their current set of proprietary programs. This means that x86 will never disappear while this is true. It will not matter if Intel and AMD both become bankrupt tomorrow and no other x86 manufacturer rises to replace them, the world's population is far too addicted to Windows and their current set of Windows software to care about any other potential computer instruction set..

The ones from ASUS seem better, have been running one as a headless Linux workstation for years. Had various issues with Intel's, couldn't install Linux on it properly, now it sits on a shelf. At least it is small. Look at Shuttle if you need dual NIC, have one as a pfsense router, not bad.

I'd kill for a NUC equipped with a 2400G(E) and Thunderbolt!

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If adversaries get physical access you got more things to worry about than Thunderbolt having DMA to the RAM.

Really it being insecure is a good thing!

Do you not understand that all matters of security are meaningless when people have physical access to the machine.

youtube.com/watch?v=sZKtHvbAk98

I'd rather get a Mintbox than one of those pseudogaming Indiegogo turds. Still might get a NUC with all the bells and whistles because I'm a lazy bastard and I like the aesthetic.

t. OP

Would it be possible to write an x86 emulator that runs without the user having to worry about it? Apple did something like this with Rosetta when they moved from PPC to Intel: whenever the user launched an app compiled for PPC the emulator would translate the PPC instructions to x86 instructions on the fly and the user would never notice anything. Of course it required extra processing power, but it worked.

Mintbox 2 series will be great, but they'll still have a weaker CPU and GPU.

Fair enough. I don't care terribly much about the GPU since I won't be doing much gaming or resource intensive processes related to graphics. The CPU though, that's what I'd be more interested to know about. If this Atari box does come out, will it be completely free software? And will the hardware be modular and easy to take apart and customize?

They will have a proprietary Atari launcher. You can install a libre Linux OS over it.
Mini PCs almost exclusively aren't customizable apart from storage and memory so I doubt this will be an exception.
The CPU is great though. Although there are better choices in the sub 40W TDP like the 2300U, 2700U and 2200GE (which isn't released yet), but they'd just increase the total cost by $100-$150 which would lose a lot of potential buyers.

You can take apart a NUC and change things beyond memory. It is just harder to find compatible hardware with the existing shit in there. Thanks for the clarification of the Atari, however. I'm interested to see if anything will come to fruition from the project.