Getting your hands on the CuBox-i4x4 for the first time is kind of scary. It’s a two-inch cube made of ABS plastic that looks more like a novelty item than a serious computer. It fits in your hand like a small paperweight. But inside that simple case is a quad-core i.MX6 processor, 4GB of DDR3 RAM, Gigabit Ethernet, Bluetooth 4.0, and enough multimedia power to decode full HD video at speeds above 100 Mbps. There’s something about this product that makes you think about what computer hardware really needs to look like.
SolidRun, an Israeli company that has been making embedded computers since 2010, has built its name on this way of thinking. Powerful computers that use little power don’t need a tower case, a loud fan, or a power brick the size of a hardback book. In this philosophy, the CuBox-i4x4 is a device clearly made for developers, makers, and engineers who needed more space than earlier CuBox models provided, without going too far into the realm of bulky single-board computers that need a mess of cables just to get started.
The fact that the i4x4 doesn’t have any moving parts is a really useful feature. There is no fan or spinning drive; there is only passive cooling and solid-state storage. That’s more important than it sounds in real life. If you put a fanless system in an industrial setting or behind a digital signage screen, it won’t get clogged up with dust in the heatsink or stop working after two years because the cheap fan stopped working. The quiet reliability argument is built into the hardware, and it makes a good case.
For something this small, there are more ways to connect than you might think. There is an eSATA port, an optical audio out, an infrared receiver and transmitter, an HDMI output, two USB 2.0 ports, a MicroUSB console port, and a real-time clock with a backup battery. It seems like a list made by someone who had tried to use small computers in the real world but kept running into features that were missing. The i4x4 seems to be made so that you don’t have to worry about missing a port in the middle of a project, whether you’re making a home media center, a smart kiosk, or a small IoT gateway.
It’s important to note that software support has been a weakness for niche embedded hardware in the past, and SolidRun seemed to take that into account here. When the company first started, it offered Linux-based options like Kodi, Android, Yocto, and Debian. This range of options covers both general media use cases and more technical development environments. This space doesn’t always offer that much breadth. A lot of small computers come with just one Linux image, a basic wiki, and nothing else. It looked like the CuBox-i4x4 was meant to avoid that trap. It remains to be seen how well the community and documentation held up over time, though.
It’s still not clear where the CuBox-i4x4 fits into the conversation about small computers, which has become a lot more crowded since it was first introduced. The Raspberry Pi, ODROID, and many other ARM-based platforms now have more to offer. But it seems like the CuBox-i line has always been a little different. It’s not as much about hobbyist tinkering and more about ready-to-use deployments in digital signage, multimedia, and industrial floors. The fanless case, passive cooling, and “industrial-grade reliability” all point to a product that was made for places where uptime is more important than price.
But the CuBox-i4x4 really got it right when it came to the form factor. Size doesn’t have to be a sign of computing power. That machine that stays out of the way in the corner of a deployment rack for years without making a sound is sometimes the most useful. That’s not a very exciting value proposition. However, it’s likely the most honest one for the engineers and developers who need it.
