Being able to hold a CuBox for the first time is kind of strange. You can hold it in your hand; it’s a small cube that’s only two inches across and weighs 91 grams. It doesn’t feel like a computer. It looks like something from a toy set for kids. It quickly changes how you feel after you plug it in.
SolidRun is an Israeli company that is known for making small, power-efficient computers. They first released the CuBox in December 2011. It began shipping in early 2012 and was first made for embedded system developers who needed something open, cheap, and small. SolidRun said at the time that it was the first desktop computer on the market that was based on the Marvell Armada 500-series SoC. They also said it was the smallest desktop computer in the world. Big claims for something that looked like a stack of paper.
The original CuBox wasn’t just interesting because of its size. Nothing that used less than three watts of power (less than one watt when not in use) could stream and decode 1080p video, run full desktop environments like KDE or GNOME under Linux, and do all of that without a fan. There are parts of the tech world where no one even notices that. It didn’t work that way.
SolidRun added the CuBox-i family in November 2013. It has four models, i1, i2, i2eX, and i4Pro, and they all run Freescale’s i.MX6 processors. It was clear that the company was thinking about more than just developers. At the same time, a media-focused branch called CuBoxTV appeared, having been announced in late 2014. Its main goal was to run Kodi on the OpenELEC operating system. It was a simpler machine with a quad-core i.MX6 processor and 1GB of RAM. It was made for people who wanted a media box for the living room instead of a place to play around with electronics. There were a lot of other devices like the CuBox on the market at that point, but people knew and liked it.
It’s important to note that SolidRun never really went after the mass market like some of its competitors did. They’ve always done business with a quiet confidence, putting out hardware for people who know what they’re doing or at least want to learn. When you do things that way, you tend to build a certain type of community—one that doesn’t mind if the hardware isn’t perfect as long as it’s honest about what it is.
The CuBox-M, which is also sold as the CuBox Pulse, is the newest and most important member of the family. It is based on NXP’s i.MX 8M Plus system-on-module and has a neural network coprocessor with 2.3 TOPS of compute performance, which earlier generations didn’t have. For most users, that’s not a big deal, but it’s important for edge AI applications, industrial monitoring, or anyone making smart devices that need to do inference on the device. The device comes in the same two-inch cube shape as before and has Wi-Fi 5, Bluetooth 5.0, gigabit Ethernet, two USB 3.0 ports, and Power-over-Ethernet as an option.
The 1GB commercial version costs $99, and the 3GB industrial version costs $190. The industrial version has a wider temperature range and a slightly different SoC. It’s still not clear if SolidRun will release versions with more memory. They’ve hinted at 4GB and even 8GB versions, but nothing official has come out yet.
Over the course of more than ten years, SolidRun has created something truly unique with the CuBox: a line of products that keeps changing without losing its original style. The focus on efficiency, the cube shape, and the lack of fans have all stayed the same, even though the insides have changed from ARM v6 cores to neural network accelerators. It’s harder to keep up that level of continuity than it looks. Most hardware companies change direction, rebrand, or quietly stop making things. SolidRun is always shrunk and smarter as the cube.
