He laughed when he held it for the first time. On his desk, next to a coffee mug that easily dwarfed it, was a small black cube that was only two inches on a side. That same CuBox-i4Pro is still kept by an Austin developer eleven years later on a shelf above his workstation, next to a pile of more recent, ostensibly smarter boards. He claims that he looks at it more frequently than he anticipates.
The CuBox-i, manufactured by SolidRun in the northern Israeli town of Yokne’am, was never meant to be a game-changer. The entry-level model, which promised a quad-core Freescale i, was sold for $45.MX6 power and weighed roughly the same as a deck of cards. Speaking with engineers who have actually used one, there’s a feeling that the gadget entered the market covertly. It lacked the Raspberry Pi’s marketing budget. It lacked Intel’s logistics. What it had was a quietly capable design that streamed 1080p on three watts, ran Linux and Android without any issues, and resisted overheating in areas where larger boards would have cried out for a fan.
The review unit was ordered by the developer in question, Dan, from a UK reseller in late 2014 after he became dissatisfied with the bloated x86 boards his team continued to use. By then, he had been developing embedded systems for business clients for nearly ten years. Atom chips, fans, heat sinks, and the ongoing trade-off between thermals and performance constituted the majority of his work. He was surprised by what the CuBox-i did when it booted. It simply worked. Don’t hunt drivers. There are no kernel patches. He still finds it slightly ridiculous that a micro-SD card from a HummingBoard slid in and ran.
He keeps bringing up that brief, almost unremarkable experience in conversations. He contends that there has always been a maximalist inclination in American hardware culture. More silicon, cooling, watts, and cores. That was not the case with the CuBox-i. Constructed by a ten-person team under the direction of two Israeli Arabs, Kossay Omary and Rabeeh Khoury, who both graduated from Technion in Nazareth, the device embodied a philosophy that American startups seldom publicly expressed: that restraint in hardware could be a form of intelligence.
At the time, not everyone was in agreement. Reddit early adopters bemoaned the company’s apparent rapid progress, the disappearance of first-generation support, and the disappearance of documentation following a forum hack. Those grievances were valid. However, the CuBox-i family—the i1, i2, i2eX, and i4Pro—persevered in critical situations, such as operating digital signage, home automation, and media servers for an expansive Australian estate that was allegedly powered by a single cube. The term “edge computing” wasn’t particularly popular at the time. In any case, the CuBox was doing it.
Observing the embedded industry today, it’s difficult to ignore how much of what SolidRun was doing in 2013 has become standard practice. At the edge is ARM. Fanless designs intended for industrial use. software stacks that are compatible with different product lines. SolidRun itself advanced to the CuBox-M and beyond, focusing on challenging environments and AI workloads. Dan continues to use that old i4Pro as a reminder in the interim. He points to the cube whenever a client requests that he overspecify a board for a project that doesn’t require it. Three watts. four-core. Give or take a few power cycles, eleven years of continuous operation.
Speaking with him gives me the impression that the review recalibrated his instincts rather than altering his career. When the job requires it, he continues to purchase American silicon. However, the notion that being larger and hotter is inherently superior never truly returned. That was taken care of by a tiny cube from a small business in a small Israeli town.
