Mini-computers of one form or another are becoming increasingly popular, including USB stick PCs and tiny computer boards, and Samsung is about to unleash a new device that falls into the latter category.
The Artik 10 will be available to purchase online next month, Samsung has just announced (as spotted by PC World), and it's designed for Internet of Things (IoT) applications, particularly those requiring demanding video encoding or playback, and is another rival to the freshly baked Raspberry Pi 3.
Samsung's board has an eight-core processor (ARM Cortex A15 quad-core at 1.5GHz plus A7 quad-core at 1.3GHz), albeit a 32-bit CPU rather than 64-bit as seen on the Pi 3. The Artik has a Mali T628 MP6 GPU and 2GB LPDDR3 system RAM along with 16GB eMMC storage. It's capable of displaying 1080p video at up to 120 frames per second.
Wireless connectivity includes Bluetooth, Zigbee and 802.11ac Wi-Fi, plus you get three USB ports (including one USB 3.0).
Bank-level security
On the security front, there's a hardware embedded Security Element that works with ARM TrustZone and Trustonic's Trusted Execution Environment and according to Samsung this provides 'bank-level' security end-to-end.
Finally, in terms of size, the board's dimensions are 39 x 29 x 3.5mm.
Samsung notes: "The scalable processing power of the Artik 10 makes it ideally suited for video and image processing tasks like autonomous vehicle navigation, intensive 3D graphics or large immersive displays.
"Alternatively, the small size of the Artik 10 enables servicing application domains with a high local computation requirement, like model-based robotic control, virtual reality or image processing."
Unfortunately there is no news on pricing yet, but as PC World reports, it could well be a bit more expensive than the Raspberry Pi 3 which runs to $35 (it's around £28-£30 in the UK).
As we demonstrate in the video below, it's perfectly possible to use a Pi 3 as a replacement for your desktop PC, as long as you can cope with rather sluggish performance with certain tasks. And the same will of course likely be true of the Artik 10.
- Other recent Raspberry Pi-alikes include the Orange Pi One
