Sightings: New teeny, powerful PC well-suited for digital signage?

January 19, 2011 by Dave Haynes

As spotted in Engadget:

The Israeli firm Compulab has released a 6 inch by 6 inch, 1 inch thick little box called the Fit PC3 with a dual-core AMD and Radeom HD graphics card, and no fan. I am no propeller head, but that sounds like a pretty spanking nice little digital signage player.

Reports the gadget blog: 

Maximum spec sees the insertion of an AMD G-series T56N processor, aka the Fusion Zacate, offering dual cores at 1.6GHz while pulling down 18W TDP, paired with a Radeon HD 6310, the two running cool enough to not need a single fan.

There’s up to 4GB of DDR3 memory, room for a 2.5-inch HDD, HDMI and DisplayPort connectors, a whopping six USB 2.0 ports, and even dual eSATA if you need external storage. No word on price just yet but it’s said to be “competitive” compared to its predecessors, like the PC2, which currently costs between $300 and $700 depending on configuration.

There is more on this Hebrew gadget blog, which has English further down …

Fit-PC the world’s smallest computer, manufactured by the Israeli company CompuLab, is coming out with its third and most advanced model to date. The tiny computer has a slimmer design and hardware specifications that are similar or possibly exceeding the performance of a netbook, while still maintaining very low power consumption.

Width of 6.3 “x 6.3” and only 0.98 “thick, it has a dual-core processor and HD capabilities through an HDMI output and it is completely fanless. This time around choosing the new APU AMD platform, that unifies all of the computer’s components into one component (APU). And so, you will find the AMD G Series processor, which provides dual-core 1.6GHz processing with high graphics capabilities using AMD Radeon HD 6310.

“CompuLab’s fit-PC family of miniature fan-less industrial PCs has gained an excellent reputation in the industry as low power, reliable platforms,” said Irad Stavi, Director of Business Development at CompuLab.

We also asked Mr Stavi, how does CompuLab deal with competition from SE Asia in light of the higher local manufacturing costs. “The computer is a critical element in an industrial system. In the industrial market reliability and performance take precedence over price, and the success of the fit-PC series highlights that. “Mr. Stavi added that fit-PC3 is not meant to replace the fit-PC2, but rather to provide a solution to applications having higher performance requirements, therefore the company will keep on supplying fit-PC2 for years to come.

The Fit-PC3 comes in several configurations with a choice between AMD APU G-T56N 1.6GHz or G-T40N 1.0GHz to be launched on May – June of this year. Price was not published yet.

I don’t know anyone who uses the earlier versions, which may or may not had enough under the hood to drive video screens. As with anything, budget or not, you’d want to test the hell out of it to ensure reliability. Anything that ‘s fanless needs to efficiently get rid of its heat.