Mobile Lidlessness - a Great Opportunity for OEM Mini-Desktops?

[know of fence]

Building a desktop smaller than the shoe-carton form-factor, is a major hassle. A lack of standards for power supplies & bricks and no room for effective cooling solutions is exacerbated by the return of the de-lidding nightmare and a 84 W TDP that is above the magical 60W required for some of the sexier passively cooled enclosures.

All of these concerns don't exist for OEMs, who just need to copy the success of the Mac mini: using mobile Haswell parts to build a mini-desktop that for the first time may be superior to desktop towers by virtue of being un-lidded, future proof, and "green" - able to utilize the new low power states along with a matching power supply.

If only OEMs could resist the temptation to sell us overpriced anemic dual-cores and "nettop" disposables in that size but opt for a kind of Powercube approach similar in concept to gaming notebooks. Or is it Intel's intent to push us towards notebooks, if only for their inherent propensity to being stolen, unhinged, squashed and dropped.
Wouldn't most use-cases be better served with a pad-sized portable or smartphone and a comfy powerful home-pc rather than something as bling'ingly stupid as an ultrabook or as awful as the traditional notebook line-up?

 

[yottabit]

I think you're overestimating the impact of delidding

 

[KingFatty]

I don't understand what you mean by a mini-desktop could be superior to a desktop tower for the first time?

As for resisting temptation, I think the companies recognize a market segment, and then they create devices to satisfy the demands of that market segment.

As for opting for a new concept, maybe you are on to something, but what do you mean? The entire message seems more like marketing double-speak, and lacks a clear focus or message that I can wrap my head around.

Are you thinking something like the mini portable desktops that some gamers use, where they are like 2 shoeboxes big? I think those are very nice, portable, and can be just as powerful as a desktop. But I'm not seeing the value of shrinking it down to one shoebox size, because that decrease of a shoebox size (or less) is not really that much benefit of a decrease in absolutes, but it would involve a large sacrifice in flexibility and price because you'd not be able to use standard desktop parts? Is that what you are getting at?

 

[Zodiark1593]

What would be interesting is a ULV binned Haswell that can be overclocked. Since a ULV part can achieve a given clock speed at lower voltage, I'm guessing that given higher voltage, it can achieve greater clock speeds than the standard desktop parts.

 

[infoiltrator]

The point is supply and demand, as long as a little larger cheaper works well enough for most people 65 watt high performance is an expensive specialty game.
Laptops use "one shot" "all in one" designs and an expanding market.
Decent mini performance, iGPU, SSD, seems the best bet.
http://promotions.newegg.com/combo/13-3111/index.html

ITX
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813157386

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819116902

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16811129185

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16811129081

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16811163225

I could be happy with any of the above for a general purpose computer.
Gaming gets into discrete video cards which means Prodigy or Sugo size.
Amd APUs include 65 watt quad cores and mITX motherboards which seem ideal from your requirements.

Mobile processors will never be "superior" desktop because of power requirements, each "new" range is expected to shirk size weight.

Paasive cooling is nuisance, it is always marginal in a super small form factor.
Quiet fans are worth a little size growth, even if Noctua or equivalent are required for quiet.

If you want to put a V8 in a Hybrid, expect compromises.

 

[crashtech]

When I read the first paragraph of the OP, all I could think of is the new Mac Pro, a 10" high by 6" diameter cylinder housing a Xeon and two GPUs. I'm a PC guy, but Apple is showing the SFF world a thing or two with their new offering, and it doesn't even involve special lidless chips or sacrificing power in any way.

 

[aigomorla]

wow please read bottom for OP!!!

my post got bump'd to the top.