World's Smallest PC Motherboard & Broadwell NUC vs 2008 Skulltrail - CES 2015
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2015-05-07
·
1,815 words · ~9 min read
0:00
Linus tech tips coverage of ces 2015 is brought to you by phantom glass visit
0:05
store.phantom.glass for the best darn screen protectors out there as well as
0:08
hyperx so this is it we've got broadwell all
0:13
over the freaking place all of a sudden so Intel is trumpeting a variety of
0:19
things about this so of course we've got slightly better performance per clock
0:22
but the big story is has got to be power
0:25
consumption so thanks to its extremely low power consumption and heat output
0:30
broadwell is enabling a whole new class of devices for these guys so check this
0:34
out this is actually a fully functional
0:37
broadwell so this chip on here so right here this package has a CPU and GPU
0:43
right here and then it's actually got a chipset right here that CPU goes
0:47
anywhere from 1.1 to 2.6 gigahertz it's
0:50
a dual core and the GPU even more impressively Intel's got some 3d mark
0:56
ice storm stuff going on over here they're saying actually outperforms the
1:00
recently announced tegra x1 where
1:03
they're taking what they're calling it's actually kind of funny so for the first
1:07
time they're taking a leadership position in 3d graphics in really any
1:12
kind of space i mean who saw this one coming i mean probably the people paying
1:16
very close attention to how much of the die size of recent Intel cpus is
1:20
dedicated to graphics but other than that you didn't stand much of a chance
1:24
also on this board is four gigs of RAM on the back you've got an interface that
1:28
allows an SSD up to 512 gigs and Intel
1:31
cheated a little bit here with me so they told me oh well Linus it only
1:35
weighs here we can wait for our scale to go come on over here it only weighs uh
1:39
12 grams but of course they didn't put the uh copper heatsink on it that
1:44
obviously it's gonna need so let's go ahead and 12 grams that's a massive 14
1:51
grams you liars so it's still the lightest pc that i've ever encountered
1:56
uh we're gonna see this in a variety of different devices so this one's a pretty
2:00
incredible little number just to make my point about how light it is here i'm
2:04
gonna hold it by as tiny a corner as i possibly can that is how light this
2:09
little panasonic device is i don't even know what this is this is the cfrz4
2:14
it is a full-fledged computer yes full i o you've got your usb 3 super speed all
2:19
that nonsense three of those gigabit Ethernet this is not a cut down device
2:22
in any way and it is running a board like that inside we've got the other one
2:27
here so this is the demo machine that they're using in order to make their
2:30
point about how fast graphics are so you saw
2:34
me just pull it off of the base the computer itself is not in the base of
2:38
this device at all it is actually all up here same thing 1.1 turboing all the way
2:42
up to 2.6 gigahertz this is some tomfoolery magic that they're doing
2:46
because the power consumption of these chips is going to be anywhere from four
2:50
and a half to six watts and then at the very high end 15 watts but thanks to
2:55
their 14 nanometer manufacturing process and some little tricks with being able
2:59
to push like massive amounts of current through it for microseconds at a time
3:04
enabling exactly the performance you need when you need it you're able to
3:07
achieve well the kinds of things that we're looking at right here and still
3:10
have a device that doesn't get so hot you have to drop it i was hoping to get
3:14
more of a reaction from you guys i should have gone for a longer drop before i caught it usually i get people
3:18
to freak out they've got another cool one here so this is actually more field
3:22
this is not unfortunately uh broadwell
3:26
so it's not exactly something that launched just now but the device itself
3:29
launched today this is the venue eight from dell this has a two gigahertz quad
3:33
core in it it's an Android based tablet and this is a pretty sick looking little
3:38
device it's got an 8.4 inch 2560 by 1600
3:42
OLED screen it's got two gigs of RAM 16
3:46
gigs of storage on the model that i'm holding today and what's kind of cool about it is i don't know if you guys can
3:50
see what's going on with this picture right here where it's like
3:54
there's okay the background and foreground are shifting separately anyway it's got a 3d camera on the back
3:59
which is a pretty neat little feature to have this is six millimeters thick and
4:05
as far as Android tablets go it takes a fair bit to impress me but i'm impressed
4:10
by how thin it is i'm impressed by how gorgeous it is and i'm impressed that
4:14
Intel managed to get a design win in a tablet this small and this thin because
4:18
they've been kind of beating this drum for a while and we haven't seen much
4:21
success but here it is guys that is an absolutely beautiful little device to
4:26
drive home the point because i mean oh yeah here's edison i've actually never
4:30
touched one so the lightest computer in the world bluetooth wireless CPU all
4:36
that kind of stuff on there that's pretty freaking cool so i've i've criticized Intel in the past
4:40
particularly on our podcast saying you know it feels like they've abandoned you
4:44
know the enthusiast a little bit you know they're not really giving us dual
4:48
processor systems anymore and all that crazy stuff i actually happen to be
4:51
standing in the same room as one of the
4:55
uh one of the founders of the whole skull trail concept over at Intel where
4:59
which is one of the things i love to hearken back to the last time they cared
5:02
about us they gave us dual processors on a single motherboard they let us
5:07
overclock the snot out of it those were the good old days but i don't know i
5:11
guess another perspective on all that i'm still going to keep ragging on them
5:14
until i see you know dual processors and on overclockable motherboards but i
5:18
guess another perspective on that a point that Intel's trying to make and i
5:22
kind of messed up the demo here but this is a demo that they actually showed off on
5:26
skull trail back when they launched it in 2008 they had like minus 40 degree
5:32
liquid cooling on the bloody thing in order to get this to even run hopefully
5:36
there we go there's the pictures of the machine so we've got like a touch
5:40
interface thing going on here this is the rig they had running dual processors
5:44
quad gpus let's go ahead and okay we'll zoom in more i haven't actually used
5:48
this before so i'm trying this for the first time anyway there we go that's
5:51
what they were running that was the board it was running and they ran this
5:55
demo and blew people away with it so what was that 350 000 photos or
6:00
something like that
6:04
okay about 300 billion pixels and being able to interact with it like this in
6:09
real time was like this amazing thing holy crap look at what we built and then
6:14
they kind of lift up the curtain here and show that they now have that demo
6:17
from 2008 running on their new broadwell
6:22
nook right there yes it's getting a little bit toasty no it doesn't seem
6:26
particularly happy about running the demo but it is actually doing it so uh
6:32
there you go i guess that's moore's law at work are they ignoring enthusiasts uh
6:37
you could look at it that way or are they just making enthusiast hardware
6:41
very different than it used to look in the past well that's what i'll say with
6:44
all the Intel people watching me here in the suite either way it's a very cool
6:48
demo and it's amazing to see how far we've come in six
6:52
years i mean think about that oh i missed one bring bring please so this is
6:57
another little cool this is another broadwell device so this is from ASUS
7:01
same thing totally detachable tablet totally thin absolutely unbelievable
7:07
this one doesn't have the 2.6 gigahertz turbosku in it um did you end up looking
7:11
at the CPU speed is it about 2.6 all right well there you
7:15
go i lied i misled you guys i'm very sorry i apologize it's only barely thick
7:20
enough you can see there's just enough room for the panel
7:24
the touch interface and then a three and a half millimeter jack that is it that
7:29
is all the space there is on this tablet slash convertible slash two and one
7:34
slash whatever marketing name there is for it these days so pretty amazing
7:38
stuff going on here and i'm looking forward to more reviews of
7:42
guys let me know what devices you want to see us check out and we will try to do that over the next little while also
7:46
don't miss any of our ces coverage make sure you guys are subscribed and i want
7:50
to spend a moment to give a huge shout out to our sponsors phantom glass visit
7:54
store.phantom.glass for the best darn screen protectors out there you won't be
7:57
able to see that there's a screen protector on my phone but it's because it's made of gorilla glass it is
8:01
fingerprint resistant it is scratch resistant it has absolutely no bubbles
8:05
under it i don't think you could put bubbles under a phantom glass screen protector if you tried so you can find a
8:10
link to that in the video description below and also a shout out to kingston
8:14
excuse me hyperx i hope they don't watch this one it's hyperx not kingston hyperx
8:18
so check out the hyperx youtube channel over at youtube.com hyperx we've got a
8:22
lot of great gaming content we'll have that linked in the video description as
8:25
well