Zotac Announces Their First PC-On-A-Stick

The SFF PC market has long been an important area of business for Zotac. The company has produced numerous mini-PCs over the years, but now it is introducing its smallest PCs to date–PCs on a stick, essentially–the Zbox PI220 and PI221.

These new mini-PCs are similar to Intel’s Compute Stick in both size and internal hardware. The PI220 and PI221 each have one HDMI out connection and a single USB 3.0 port. In this regard, Intel’s Compute Stick has more to offer, as it has two USB ports, making it easier to connect peripherals.

The internal hardware is fairly similar to the Compute Stick, as well. Both of Zotac’s devices and the Compute Stick use an Intel Atom X5-Z8300 Cherry Trail SoC with four Airmont CPU cores. The CPU cores have a base frequency of 1.44 GHz and a turbo boost speed of 1.84 GHz. DDR3L (2 GB) clocked at 1600 MHz is connected to the SoC over a single-channel 64-bit memory interface, providing the system with 12.8 GB/s of bandwidth

Currently, Zotac’s primary competitor in this market space is Intel. There are other competing products such as the Archos PC Stick and the Lenovo Ideacentre Stick 300, but these two devices are at a disadvantage compared to Intel’s second generation Compute Stick and Zotac’s Zbox PI220 and PI221.

All of these devices share a similar design, but Archos’s and Lenovo’s combatants use older Bay Trail-based SoCs. In addition to running slightly hotter and operating at marginally lower clock speeds, the Bay Trail-based SoCs also have weaker iGPUs, with just 4 EUs. This gives Zotac and Intel a strong performance advantage in any tasks that use the iGPU.

There is currently no word on pricing or availability.