CompuLab from Israel has debuted the third generation of the fanless, rugged Airtop mini-PC. The Airtop comes with enhanced memory capacity, increased connectivity options, and Intel’s 9th gen Core CPU at the helm of affairs.
CompuLab’s Irad Stavi said, ‘Apparently, the appetite for performance at the IoT edge knows no boundaries. We are seeing remarkable performance gains in the latest generation of CPUs and GPUs, but with great power comes greater power consumption. However, our engineers were able to improve the thermal headroom of Airtop3’s Natural Airflow cooling by over 30 percent, so there was no need to settle for low power chips. This makes Airtop3 a small-form-factor fanless IoT edge server with unprecedented performance.’
According to Stavi, the Airtop 3 is about twice as powerful as its predecessor. It features Intel Core i9-99900K along with with Intel UHD 630 graphics. However, it has also been reported that Airtop 3 will come housing Intel’s Xeon E processors. It can handle up to 128 GB of DDR4 Ram and offers Storage that has been made up using six components as standard – four 2.5-inch HDDs or SSDs and two NMVe SSds at up to 2 TB each. Users can also access the inside of the aluminum chassis without requiring any tools.
The Airtop 3 has dual gigabit Ethernet LAN, two DisplayPort 1.2 and HDMI 1.4 connections along with six USB 3.1 gen 1 Type A ports on its back. It also features three more USB ports at its front – gen 2 Type C, gen 2 Type A, and gen 1 Type A – and three RS232 serial ports. The Airtop 3 has an OLED display incorporated into it that shows the real-time power consumption, temperatures, and other system information. It also has two DC power inputs with auto failover. The power consumption has been noted to be between 8 and 300 W. It is capable of operating in temperature ranges of -40° C to 70° C (-40 to 158° F) and 5-95 percent humidity.
If all this was not enough, Airtop 3 also offers add-ons such as NVM3 card featuring 3x NVMe M.2 storage, Nvidia Quadro RTX 4000 or GeForce GTX 1660 Ti discrete graphics, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.2 and cellular comms. It measures in at 3.9 x 11.8 x 10 inches with a footprint of 7.5 liters. It is available if you can manage $999!