Habey USA Unveils Fanless Embedded PC

A monster inside that little box? i think so. fanless? what about the cpu? it just uses heatsink? ummmmmm

Not quite a monster but the new Cedar Trail do have a lower max TDP than the previous Pine Trail and that makes it easier for them to go fan-less as long as the heat sink is large enough.

For the netbook range though only the lower end N2600 is considered the one that can go fan-less with a max TDP of just 3.5W, vs 6.5W for the N2800 and 10W for the D2700. Not counting the heat generated by the NM10 and other components of course. While it's even harder for the tablets to be kept cool enough and so we may have to wait for Clover Trail to come out later this year before we see more fan-less designs that aren't a nettop.

The main improvement is the GPU performance, which for the 640MHz GMA 3650 is more than just a 60% performance boost. Pine Trail's GMA 3150 was only a 200MHz with pipelines of 2 / 0 Pixel- / Vertexshader, 8-384MB shared memory, DirectX 9c, Shader 3.0, OpenGL 1.5, Clear Video HD (SD Videos only), MPEG-2 Decode, and Adaptive Interlacing. No SDVO ports meant the GMA 3150 could not support HDMI, DVI, or Display Port options.

The SGX545 that the new GMA's are based on are slightly better than the SGX535 that the GMA 500 was based on. So combined with the higher clock speeds the GMA 3600 is rated double the performance of the GMA 500 and the GMA 3650 us just at the triple mark. While the GMA 600 is basically the GMA 500 but with the clock speed doubled to 400MHz.

The difference is just not in raw performance though as the GMA 3600 the clock speed is 400MHz with pipelines of 4 / 0 Pixel- / Vertexshader, DirectX 10.1 (though until they provide fixed drivers support defaults down to 9.0c), OpenGL 3.2, OpenCL 1.0, and DVMT 1024. Along with full hardware acceleration of MPEG-2, VC-1, AVC, and can handle up to 20Mbps Blu Ray 2.0 playback. Though it has already been shown to handle a 23Mbps of H.264 and 4.5Mbps of DTS-HD audio being decoded with a Cedar Trail CPU level of under just 20%. While adding support for HDMI and Display Port, along with eDP for alternate to LVDS.

The GMA 3650 is the same but raises the clock speed to 640MHz and still manages to keep the max TDP pretty low.

Though considering a AMD Fusion can provide up to 9x the performance of the GMA 3150 that graphical performance is still pretty low for the new GMA's in comparison but at least allows a newer ATOM system to be a good HTPC option for media streaming and you can squeeze in some basic gaming that wasn't possible before.

Other than the GPU the Cedar Trail doesn't change much besides a manufacturing shrink from 45nm to 32nm. So CPU performance isn't that much improved besides a slightly higher average clock speed and making even the lower end N2600 a dual core instead of single core. The N2800 at 1.86GHz should provide about the performance of the older D525 1.8GHz, but being a mobile chip means more power saving options for a greener solution.

The D2700 at 2.13GHz is also a bit of bump for CPU performance but over clockers were setting their 1.8GHz D525's to around that speed anyway. So won't be that significant a boost to everyone but the new max is probably around 2.4GHz for over clockers that combined with the GMA boost may be worth the upgrade unless they're using a Nvidia ION in their nettop.

While Intel also apparently plans to expand the range of offerings later with slightly higher clocked options like the N2850 will be a 2GHz chip with a max TDP of presumably 6.6W and can probably be over clocked to 2.1GHz

Yay for quiet PC's. Let's keep this trend going.

The only application I ever see for these things is for cars/mobile or very specific applications limited by ventilation, space etc.

I don't see what their purpose is when they go up against desktops and laptops, they just don't compare in terms of power

Industrial and embedded PC usages are not the same as general consumer PC's. Most applications are for things like IT and benefit more from reliability and durability. Along with being compact solutions for minimum fuss for weight and size that helps apply them to a wide range of applications without needing any redesigns/moddifications to existing setups.