MSI intros fanless, compact industrial mini PC with ARM CPU and Nvidia Ampere iGPU

It appears that MSI has a new industrial mini PC on offer, spotted by LinuxGizmos. Dubbed the MS-C9ZA, the compact fanless industrial PC packs an Nvidia SoC and a healthy set of connectivity options.

To be precise, the MS-C9ZA mini PC is powered by the Jetson Orin Nano platform, featuring a hexa-core ARM CPU consisting of Cortex-A78 AE cores and 4 MB of L3 cache, paired with 8 GB of LPDDR5 RAM at 3,200 MT/s. Memory bandwidth is officially listed to be around 102 GB/s. 

The SoC also packs an Ampere iGPU featuring 1024 CUDA cores and 32 tensor cores. According to Nvidia's official first-party numbers, the system should be capable of achieving 67 TOPS of AI performance (INT8).

Clearly, the fanless industrial mini PC should be well suited for factory automation, machine vision systems, edge inference, as well as industrial robotics controllers. Given its passively cooled design and compact footprint, the system can do its job even in tight spaces.

Being targeted at industrial and hobbyist workloads, the mini PC features the following set of I/O options: 

• Dual USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A
• Single USB 2.0 Type-C
• 8-bit GPIO (5V to 35V)
• Dual I2C, dual UART, and one CAN
• HDMI
• Dual Gigabit Ethernet

Storage requirements are handled by a 256 GB SSD. While the RAM can obviously not be upgraded, the storage can be, through the industrial mini PCs' M.2 2280 slot. A second M.2 slot, which happens to be the 2230 flavor, is also present. Moreover, folks who desire cellular connectivity can take advantage of an optional 5G daughter board. 

The mini PC measures in at just 126 x 96 x 74 mm, or roughly 4.96 x 3.78 x 2.91 inches. Being fanless, the system relies solely on its chunky heatsink for thermal dissipation, making the mini PC weigh in at around 1 kg or 2.2 pounds.

Like most other products intended for industrial and enterprise usage, the pricing and availability details of the MS-C9ZA mini PC are unclear as of this writing. Interested customers can reach out to MSI directly and get a quotation for the same.

For casual consumers on the lookout for a typical consumer mini PC, the Ryzen 7-powered Minisforum X1 Lite mini PC might be a decent option currently available for $663 on Amazon.