IceWhale Expertise is trying to scale up from its compact ZimaBoard single-board laptop (SBC) design, unveiling a six-bay community hooked up storage (NAS) gadget dubbed the ZimaCube — and promising a “private cloud” together with the power to run massive language networks (LLMs) on gadget.
“We have designed ZimaCube for many who worth their information and put in lengthy hours,” the corporate claims of its newest design. “Securely retailer, set up, and entry your recordsdata from any gadget, anyplace with a 6-bay HDD, quad M.2 SSD, and quad 2.5GbE design; get pleasure from lightning-fast information transfers throughout a number of units whereas our PCIe enlargement ensures the countless potential for leveling up your system to a different norm.”
It is no ZimaBoard: IceWhale’s newest design is a chunky NAS field packing a heap of computing energy. (📷: IceWhale Expertise)
For IceWhale, it is a main departure. Again in 2021 the corporate launched a crowdfunding marketing campaign for the ZimaBoard, a passively-cooled single-board laptop constructed round an Intel Celeron processor and boasting two SATA ports and a PCI Specific slot for enlargement. Whereas the heatsink case added a bit of bulk, the ZimaBoard was undeniably compact for its specs — and earlier this yr the corporate unveiled its successor, the glossy ZimaBlade.
The ZimaCube, although, is way from compact. Its width is, naturally, constrained by the area required to suit six 3.5″ exhausting drive bays utilizing hot-swap sleds; the peak then stretches above that required by the drives to make room for a single-board laptop and energy {hardware}. There’s additionally a 256GB SSD as normal, with room for 2 further NVMe storage units — with a ZimaCube Professional mannequin including in one other 4.
Exact specs rely on mannequin chosen: the bottom ZimaCube customers an Intel Processor N100 chip with 4 cores working at as much as 3.4GHz, comes with 8GB of DDR4 RAM and assist for as much as 32GB, has two 2.5-gig-Ethernet ports, one USB Sort-C 3.0 Gen. 1 port, 4 USB 3.0 Gen. 1 ports, and two USB 2.0 Gen. 1 ports, plus a single PCI Specific Gen. 3 slot. The ZimaBoard Professional upgrades to an Intel Core i5-1235U, providing ten cores working at as much as 4.4GHz, 16GB of DDR5 reminiscence expandable to 64GB, 4 2.5-gig-Ethernet ports, six USB 3.0 Gen. 1 ports, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, and two PCI Specific Gen. 4 slots — one x16, one x4.
The corporate claims the ZimaCube will embrace “non-public GPT” capabilities for working massive language fashions on gadget. (📷: IceWhale Expertise)
These specs could appear a bit of overkill for a easy network-attached storage gadget, and there is a purpose for that: IceWhale is positioning the system as a “private cloud,” providing the efficiency required to run a wide range of workloads on gadget — together with, it guarantees, a “non-public GPT” massive language mannequin system, offering natural-language prompt-and-response like OpenAI’s well-liked however divisive ChatGPT with out having to ship any information off to distant servers.
As with its earlier designs, IceWhale is planning to crowdfund manufacturing of the ZimaCube on Kickstarter this week; the corporate can be providing a $1 “reservation” by itself retailer, which comes with the promise of a $200 saving on the ZimaCube, a $300 saving on the ZimaCube Professional, or a $400 saving on a bundle it calls the “Creator Pack.” Crucially, although, the corporate has but to verify the pricing of any mannequin, with particulars not anticipated till the crowdfunding marketing campaign’s launch.
