We’ve now got plenty of low cost and low power ARM based boards and devices, but Intel is not sitting by idly, and in recent years they’ve worked to greatly reduce the power consumption of some of their processors, and relatively low power, cost effective Intel based motherboards will be available later this year. For example, MSI J1800i will be based on Intel Celeron J1800 dual core Bay Trail processor with 10W TDP, 64-bit support, and cost around $60 when it becomes available end of January or in February.
Here are some of the specifications of this motherboard:
- SoC – Intel Celeron J1800i dual core @ 2.41 with integrated Intel HD graphics
- System Memory – 2x DDR3-1333 SO-DIMM slots (Up to 8GB)
- Storage – 2x Serial ATA 3Gbps ports
- Video Output – HDMI, VGA, and DVI
- Connectivity – 1x Ethernet
- USB – 2x USB 3.0 host ports, 4x USB 2.0 host ports
- Expansion – single PCIe Express x1 slot
- Audio – Speaker, audio in and audio out jacks
- Misc – PS/2 mouse and keyboard connectors
The “recommended customer price” for Celeron J1800 processor is $72.00 on Intel website. I’m not sure if this is just for the “boxed version”, but it seems difficult to make a $60 motherboard with a $72 CPU, unless they talked about volume pricing. We’ll have to see. You’ll need to add memory (4GB SO-DIMM DDR3 is about $40 now), and potentially a SATA HDD or SSD to get the full price for comparison to ARM platforms. There will also be a quad core version for $70, probably based on Celeron J1850 (10W TDP).
The benchmark results below give an ideas of Intel process in terms of power consumption, by showing a Celeron J1850 (10W TDP) launched at the end of 2013 has about the same CPU performance as an Intel Core2 Duo E8200 processor (65 TDP) launched in 2008.
As a comparison, an ARM Linux or Android computer will typically consume 2.5W to 10W (possibly 15W for Cortex A15). That’s the whole board, and the motherboard above will consume more than 10W once you add all components, but the gap is narrowing.
Source: Tech Report, via Fanless Tech
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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