[smackfu]

>What is the market for desktop CPUs where the desktop buyers don't also have dedicated video cards which can do a almost a magnitude better job than the APU?

Small form factors, like the iMac or Mac mini. Apple is pretty influential in Intel's roadmap nowadays. See also how the next-gen mobile chipsets are getting more powerful onboard GPUs to drive Retina displays.

[xyzzy123]

The NUC (next-unit-of-computing) buzz is cool for robotics too.

[mturmon]

I hadn't seen that. There are lots of research oriented robotics projects that use Apple Mac Minis for compute power. You just bolt on a Mini and you have a standard environment to run computer vision, learning, or advanced path planning, communicating with the robot's own computers by UDP, for example. NUC could be a nice intermediate point between the Mini and full integration with the robot's own computers.

[xyzzy123]

NUC is nice, I measure mine at less than 10 watt for "smash the CPU" tasks, small form factor, good alternative to ridiculously expensive options like car PCs. I found it's also voltage tolerant. It's rated at 19v but you can run it at much less (down to 15).

EDIT: it does go up to nearly 20 watts, depending, esp if you have the HDMI plugged in. Technically I think you can get more out of a NUC than a mini in terms of raw MIPs. They're PCs, not toys like RPI.

[mturmon]

Thanks for the info. For the robotics use case I mentioned, having a high-performance system is important because the algos are demanding, so a RPI would not be very good.