Getting your hands on a CuBox PC for the first time is kind of funny. You can hold it in your hand like a sugar cube. It’s two inches across, two inches tall, and only 91 grams heavy. It kind of makes you think of a toy. After plugging it in, Linux starts up. That moment changes the way things look pretty quickly.
SolidRun, an Israeli hardware company, first talked about the CuBox in December 2011 as an open-source platform for developers working on embedded systems. It began to be sent out in January 2012. The company said at the time that it was the smallest desktop computer in the world. It was a big claim, but it held up. The computer was built around the Marvell Armada 510, an ARM-based system-on-chip that used less than three watts of power when it was working and almost no power when it was not. Those numbers were really surprising for a computer that could run a full desktop.
It had the power to decode 1080p video in hardware. Under Linux, it could run either KDE or GNOME. It came with both Ubuntu 10.04 and Android 2.2 installed, which seemed pretty bold for something the size of a matchbox.
The CuBox-i family, which includes the i1, i2, i2eX, and i4Pro, was added by SolidRun in November 2013. Each of these runs Freescale’s i.MX6 processors and has a different number of cores and performance level. It was the i4Pro that had a quad-core configuration that made the platform run much faster. Around the same time, SolidRun came out with the Hummingboard, which was a caseless version of the i.It was clear that the MX6 hardware was made for developers who wanted to get closer to the silicon itself. It’s still not clear if that line of products found the right customers, but the goal was clear.
Then, in December 2014, the CuBoxTV came out, which was a slightly bigger version of the idea with a focus on media. It weighs about 9.9 ounces and is shaped like a soft cube. It was made to run Kodi on the OpenELEC operating system. Inside, there is an i.MX6 quad-core processor running at 1GHz, along with 1GB of RAM and 8GB of base storage. It had a GC2000 GPU that could handle OpenGL quad shaders. It has two USB 2.0 ports, HDMI out, microSD, and Ethernet. It’s not fancy, but it doesn’t lack anything either. It did the basics for a media box in the living room without asking for much.
What’s quietly interesting about the CuBox ecosystem is that it drew in a certain type of hacker. Users who care a lot about security paid attention. The first Marvell-based CuBox got support from Kali Linux, which is a distribution for penetration testing. It feels almost silly to run Kali on something this small, from a microSD card, with a command like xzcat kali-linux-2026.2-cubox-armhf.img.xz | sudo dd of=/dev/sdX, but in the best way possible. An easy-to-carry, low-power security lab that fits in the pocket of your jacket.
Still, the CuBox was never meant to take the place of something strong. People always liked it because it didn’t ask for much: it didn’t have a fan, it didn’t use a lot of power, and it didn’t take up much desk space. When people talk about raw benchmarks, they lose sight of the practical value of that. It’s not a compromise to have a computer that works hard in the corner and uses only three watts of power. For many people, that’s the point.
It doesn’t look like SolidRun’s small-form-factor machines will ever be well-known, but that might not be the point. The hardware they made was well-thought-out for people who know exactly what they need and don’t need anything else.
