Intel’s Compute Card is a PC that can fit in your wallet
Intel mostly missed the boat on smartphones, but the company is trying to establish a firm foothold in the ever-broadening marketplace for connected appliances and other smart things. Intel's latest effort in this arena is its new "Compute Card," a small 94.5mm by 55mm by 5mm slab that includes a CPU and GPU, RAM, storage, and wireless connectivity.
The thinking with the Compute Card is to separate the smarts of various computers and appliances—all-in-ones, smart TVs, fridges, digital kiosks or signage screens, commercial equipment—from the rest of the hardware. You might want to keep a TV around for the better part of a decade, but the processing hardware inside it could start to feel slow three or four years in. With the Compute Card, one could simply eject the old card and slide in a new one instead of replacing the whole thing.
Intel hasn't given us specific information about the specs and speeds of its first Compute Cards, but you can expect the fastest ones to approach the performance of high-end fanless laptops like Apple's MacBooks. Intel told us that processors with a TDP of up to 6W could fit inside the Compute Cards, which covers both low-power Atom chips like those that powered early versions of Intel's Compute Stick to full Core M and Y-series Core i5 and i7 CPUs like the ones you find in laptops.
