Credit Card Sized Computers and Captain America: Perfect together!

That one scene in the last Captain America movie which depicted the heroes banding together to replace computer cards which allowed the massive floating aircraft carrier to stay aloft, you know that scene. Something caught my attention and it wasn’t the action or the amazing computer generated graphics. It was the card. The scene culminated in the heroes saving the day and replacing the corrupt cards with new ones allowing control of the ship to be regained and life as we know it to continue. But that card captured my imagination. What if…

The dream of credit card sized computers has been long the subject of legend and desire from the hollowed hall of Intel to the lab desks in IBM. There was even a story about an initiation of new Microsoft (News - Alert) employees being told that the culmination of computing was going to be a credit card sized computer which could run all of Microsoft demanding software.

The idea of a credit computer is fraught with complex questions of ruggedability, power requirements and cost but recently it seems that those dreams may be peaking through into our reality.

Arnouse Digital Devices Corp (ADDC) has created a credit card sized, x86 based, computer the size of a credit card complete with a quad core processor, up to 8GB DDR3 RAM (News - Alert) and 128 GB SSD. The little card is waterproof, able to handle extreme conditions and is modular in design so that it can be plugged into a laptop reader, a desktop workstation or TV.

Perhaps one of the more intriguing uses of the ADDC BioDigitalPC is in ever evolving data center vertical. The word datacenter creates images of vast warehouses filled with white elevated floors and large cooling towers housed in a magnificently large warehouse come to mind; and rightfully so. Today’s datacenters are focused on large node, energy hungry and fragile CPU’s operating in a small ambient temperature range vulnerable to any deviation to the point of catastrophic collapse if every details of its infrastructure is not followed and maintained. Preconceived notions are about to change with the invention of faster, smaller CPUs and the leveraging of small node compute clusters.

The quantity of small compute platforms being launched into today’s marketplace is staggering. From the billions of mobile phones to the Intel (News - Alert) NUC style micro-computers, manufacturers around world are trying to create a small form factor computer capable of being grouped into highly dense small node clusters to take advantage of the small nodes’ flexibility and scalability.

Intel’s latest CPUs, which feature higher performance and lower power usage, are adding fuel to this fire but designs centered on these small nodes are experiencing some stiff headwinds.

The desire for mobility, reusability and use, creates the need for modularity in platforms which have been static for many years. The traditional motherboard, even the small ones, does not conjure up visions of mobility and cell phones take advantage of ARM (News - Alert) architecture to do some amazing things but it also limits their use to lower powered apps and games. Some manufactures have created compute stations and clusters with ARM but they have not been all that successful. Even the specs don’t cry out for the deep rewrite of kernels demanded to run today’s powerful OS’s. Intel’s latest SOC designs are approaching ARM’s power usage and while still more expensive the multiple of cost is down to double instead of a factor of ten. This means there is less and less reason to design with ARM when thinking of creating new compute platforms.

One aspect of this change in paradigm’s, from large, power hungry nodes to smaller, more flexible, less power consuming nodes, is seen with a product which is getting a lot of attention recently. Arnouse Digital Devices Corporation’s (ADDC) latest BioDigitalPC leverages Intel’s E3845 and the AMD (News - Alert) G-Series, four-core CPU, both of which come complete with a powerful GPU, which has the ability to run all the latest server operating systems including Microsoft 2012, Azure Pack, VMware and many flavors of Linux. The BioDigitalPC is a credit card sized, rugged, waterproof card with a CPU, up to 8GB DDR3 and 128GB SSD. Since the BioDigitalPC is x86 based architecture it can run server operating systems without modification including VMware, Windows Server and Linux flavors such as CentOS and Unbuntu.

The interesting part of the vision which ADDC calls the BioDigitalPC ecosystem is the fact that the cards can be plugged into a slot in a laptop reader and removed and then inserted into a desktop workstation. The cards can be arranged in a pack to create a very powerful, highly dense server cluster. They have two products being introduced into the commercial markets later in the year which will allow small and medium businesses to do away with their data center rooms.

ADDC’s didn’t stop at just innovating the small form factor compute card but it went one step further by opening up the docking station design to anyone who want to design a custom reader. The company makes all its reader design schematics available, free of charge, online to create an open source type environment around the BioDigitalPC. This allows the smallest, and the largest, of organization to quickly design, build and test new work stations easily and quickly.

The future just met reality in the form of a credit card and perhaps the most intriguing thing about the card is that it’s manufactured domestically in the United States. Surely something Captain America would approve of!

About the Author: Daniel Gallic is COO, Arnouse Digital Devices Corp, a high tech research and development firm which specializes in ultra-small, form factor computing. An industry veteran he has been instrumental in bringing to market ADDC’s BioDigital PC platform, the first system which allows users to easily move their computer based, high-performance programs from form factor to form factor without missing any of the functionality.

Edited by Peter Bernstein