Those new Broadwell NUCs might be tiny, but Intel has gone even tinier with the Compute Stick: a $149 HDMI dongle that houses an almost full-fledged Windows PC.
The Compute Stick has Windows 8.1 with Bing pre-loaded, and it features a quad-core Bay Trail processor backed by 2GB of RAM and 32GB of storage. The dongle can plug into "any HDMI display," Intel says, so long as power is supplied via Micro-USB. The chipmaker eventually plans to power the device solely through HDMI, but that's not a reality yet.
Along its edges, the Compute Stick is outfitted with a power button, a full-sized USB port, the aforementioned Micro-USB port, and a microSD slot for extra storage. 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are part of the package—as is an HDMI extender, we're told.
Intel also plans to offer a Linux version of the Compute Stick priced at just $89. That model will have a lighter hardware payload, with only 1GB of RAM and 8GB of storage capacity. Still, it's not hard to imagine all kinds of nifty applications for such a tiny and affordable x86 PC.
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