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On 20/04/17 18:17, mr meowski wrote:
Live and learn. I suppose there are various sizes available. I was imagining something about the size of a biscuit tin at least. One would seem strange alongside a large monitor, keyboard and a printer.Think about the size of a modern top-end smartphone - and then subtract the bits you need to make just a computer. Strip off the keypad, antennae, battery, speakers and so on. You'll be left with an eight core 64 bit CPU and ~8Gb RAM plus a GPU, ~128Gb solid state storage and the dedicated circuitry to drive USB peripherals and wifi, bluetooth, GPS and telephony signals all on a SoC way smaller than a Raspberry Pi. Shrinkwrap it in a tiny little case with a couple of micro slots for the same power and peripheral ports as your PC and you could fit a stack of four of them inside a cigarette packet. Just one of them would run rings around a former high-end PC from 10 years ago in all but a few benchmarks. Welcome to the future. You're correct about getting inside of them though - whilst things like Intel NUCs and similar are considerably bigger than that, they do pack full scale x64 architecture into a form factor that is nonetheless tiny. Unfortunately a side effect of this impressive miniaturisation is the death of easy maintenance. I'm pretty sure the manufacturers don't want you to ever fix them, just chuck 'em in the bin and buy another one. Welcome to the past. Cheers
Most of the ones I looked at had some photos which, deliberately?, made them look quite big. It was only when I checked the actual sizes that I realised just how tiny some of them are. Yet they still seem to have many ports available. What about overheating?
Regards, Neil -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG https://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq