A stick PC or PC on a stick is a

single-board computer A single-board computer (SBC) is a complete computer built on a single circuit board, with microprocessor(s), memory, input/output (I/O) and other features required of a functional computer. Single-board computers are commonly made as demonstrati ...

in a small elongated casing resembling a stick, that can usually be plugged directly (without an HDMI cable) into an

HDMI High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) is a proprietary audio/video interface for transmitting uncompressed video data and compressed or uncompressed digital audio data from an HDMI-compliant source device, such as a display controller, ...

video port. A stick PC is a device which has independent CPUs or processing chips and which does not rely on another computer. It should not be confused with passive storage devices such as

thumb drives A USB flash drive (also called a thumb drive) is a data storage device that includes flash memory with an integrated USB interface. It is typically removable, rewritable and much smaller than an optical disc. Most weigh less than . Since first ...

. A stick PC can be connected to a peripheral device such as a

monitor Monitor or monitor may refer to: Places * Monitor, Alberta * Monitor, Indiana, town in the United States * Monitor, Kentucky * Monitor, Oregon, unincorporated community in the United States * Monitor, Washington * Monitor, Logan County, West ...

, TV, or kiosk display to produce visual or audio output. Stick PCs generally have limited computing power and are not suited for intensive tasks, but can be suitable in other applications that do not require such power.

History

The stick PC was first introduced in 2003. The

Gumstix Gumstix is an American multinational corporation headquartered in Redwood City, California. It develops and manufactures small system boards comparable in size to a stick of gum. In 2003, when it was first fully functional, it used ARM architect ...

, which came out that same year, used the

ARM architecture ARM (stylised in lowercase as arm, formerly an acronym for Advanced RISC Machines and originally Acorn RISC Machine) is a family of reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architectures for computer processors, configured ...

system on a chip A system on a chip or system-on-chip (SoC ; pl. ''SoCs'' ) is an integrated circuit that integrates most or all components of a computer or other electronic system. These components almost always include a central processing unit (CPU), memory ...

(SoC) and the

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

2.6

kernel Kernel may refer to: Computing * Kernel (operating system), the central component of most operating systems * Kernel (image processing), a matrix used for image convolution * Compute kernel, in GPGPU programming * Kernel method, in machine learnin ...

Windows CE Windows Embedded Compact, formerly Windows Embedded CE, Windows Powered and Windows CE, is an operating system subfamily developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows Embedded family of products. Unlike Windows Embedded Standard, which is base ...

can be installed on this stick. It was based on the idea of making a PC similar in size to that of an average stick of chewing gum. As the popularity of smart TVs and set-top boxes to view streaming services (such as the

Roku Roku ( ) is a brand of hardware digital media players manufactured by American company Roku, Inc. They offer access to streaming media content from online services. The first Roku model, developed in collaboration with Netflix, was introduce ...

) grew, companies started looking at making these small computers even smaller and easier to use. Several stick PCs using ARM architecture SoCs were introduced around 2012, made of sticks pluggable in an

port, including

Android Mini PC MK802 The MK802 is a PC-on-a-stick produced by Rikomagic, a Chinese company using mostly two series of Systems on a chip architectures: * AllWinner A1X SoC, based on an ARM architecture, composed of an ARM V7 based Cortex-A8 1 GHz processor, a ...

series from Rikomagic, using Android or

distributions, both based on Linux and

Allwinner Technology Allwinner Technology Co., Ltd is a fabless semiconductor company that designs mixed-signal systems on a chip (SoC). The company is headquartered in Zhuhai, Guangdong, China. It has a sales and technical support office in Shenzhen, Guangdong ...

Rockchip Rockchip (Fuzhou Rockchip Electronics Co., Ltd.) is a Chinese fabless semiconductor company based in Fuzhou, Fujian province. Rockchip has been providing SoC products for tablets & PCs, streaming media TV boxes, AI audio & vision, IoT hardware ...

SoC and

Cotton Candy Cotton candy, also known as fairy floss and candy floss, is a spun sugar confection that resembles cotton. It usually contains small amounts of flavoring or food coloring. It is made by heating and liquefying sugar, and spinning it centrifu ...

, using

Samsung Exynos Exynos, formerly Hummingbird (), is a series of ARM-based system-on-chips developed by Samsung Electronics' System LSI division and manufactured by Samsung Foundry. It is a continuation of Samsung's earlier S3C, S5L and S5P line of SoCs. Exy ...

SoC. 2013-2014 saw several manufacturers come out with stick PCs. MeeGoPad released the first x86 based stick PC, featuring the Intel Atom Z3735F Processor. In April 2013, Tronsmart released the MK908, using the Rockchip RK3188 (featuring the quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 and ARM Mali-400MP GPU). On July 24, 2013, Google introduced the

Google Chromecast Chromecast is a line of digital media players developed by Google. The devices, designed as small dongles, can play Internet-streamed audio-visual content on a high-definition television or home audio system. The user can control playback wit ...

, a streaming device similar in function and design to a stick PC. On November 19, 2014, Amazon released a smaller version of the

Amazon Fire TV Amazon Fire TV (stylized as amazon fireTV) is a line of digital media players and microconsoles developed by Amazon. The devices are small network appliances that deliver digital audio and video content streamed via the Internet to a connecte ...

called the Fire TV Stick. In March 2015, ASUS and Google introduced the Chromebit, a stick PC based on the

Rockchip RK3288 The Rockchip RK3288 is an ARM architecture System on Chip (SoC) from Rockchip. It is the first SoC, in August 2014, that uses the 32-bit ARM Cortex-A17 processor. It is a quad-core processor with a NEON coprocessor and hardware acceleration for vi ...

SoC and running Google's

ChromeOS ChromeOS, sometimes stylized as chromeOS and formerly styled as Chrome OS, is a Linux-based operating system designed by Google. It is derived from the open-source ChromiumOS and uses the Google Chrome web browser as its principal user interfac ...

. In 2016, Intel introduced the

Intel Compute Stick The Intel Compute Stick is a stick PC designed by Intel to be used in media center applications. According to Intel, it is designed to be smaller than conventional desktop or other small-form-factor PCs, while offering comparable performance. It ...

. It was discontinued in June 2020.

Neural compute sticks

In July 2017, Intel released the ''Movidius Neural Compute Stick'' which included a ''Vision Processing Unit'' for vision-specific AI workload. In January 2018, the ''Laceli AI Compute Stick'' came out, including a neural network processor unit for AI workload called ''Lightspeeur 2801S Neural Processor'', and claiming to be more powerful and more energy-efficient than the Movidius. In November 2018, the Orange Pi AI Stick 2801 came out, also featuring the ''Lightspeeur 2801S Neural Processor''.

References

{{Reflist Digital media players Networking hardware Streaming media systems