IceWhale Know-how is trying to scale up from its compact ZimaBoard single-board pc (SBC) design, unveiling a six-bay community connected storage (NAS) machine dubbed the ZimaCube — and promising a “private cloud” together with the power to run giant language networks (LLMs) on machine.

“We have designed ZimaCube for many who worth their knowledge and put in lengthy hours,” the corporate claims of its newest design. “Securely retailer, set up, and entry your information from any machine, anyplace with a 6-bay HDD, quad M.2 SSD, and quad 2.5GbE design; take pleasure in lightning-fast knowledge transfers throughout a number of gadgets whereas our PCIe growth ensures the countless potential for leveling up your system to a different norm.”

For IceWhale, it is a main departure. Again in 2021 the corporate launched a crowdfunding marketing campaign for the ZimaBoard, a passively-cooled single-board pc constructed round an Intel Celeron processor and boasting two SATA ports and a PCI Categorical slot for growth. Whereas the heatsink case added just a little bulk, the ZimaBoard was undeniably compact for its specs — and earlier this 12 months the corporate unveiled its successor, the modern ZimaBlade.

The ZimaCube, although, is way from compact. Its width is, naturally, constrained by the area required to suit six 3.5″ laborious drive bays utilizing hot-swap sleds; the peak then stretches above that required by the drives to make room for a single-board pc and energy {hardware}. There’s additionally a 256GB SSD as commonplace, with room for 2 further NVMe storage gadgets — with a ZimaCube Professional mannequin including in one other 4.

Exact specs rely on mannequin chosen: the bottom ZimaCube customers an Intel Processor N100 chip with 4 cores working at as much as 3.4GHz, comes with 8GB of DDR4 RAM and help for as much as 32GB, has two 2.5-gig-Ethernet ports, one USB Sort-C 3.0 Gen. 1 port, 4 USB 3.0 Gen. 1 ports, and two USB 2.0 Gen. 1 ports, plus a single PCI Categorical Gen. 3 slot. The ZimaBoard Professional upgrades to an Intel Core i5-1235U, providing ten cores working at as much as 4.4GHz, 16GB of DDR5 reminiscence expandable to 64GB, 4 2.5-gig-Ethernet ports, six USB 3.0 Gen. 1 ports, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, and two PCI Categorical Gen. 4 slots — one x16, one x4.

These specs could appear just a little overkill for a easy network-attached storage machine, and there is a motive for that: IceWhale is positioning the system as a “private cloud,” providing the efficiency required to run quite a lot of workloads on machine — together with, it guarantees, a “personal GPT” giant language mannequin system, offering natural-language prompt-and-response like OpenAI’s standard however divisive ChatGPT with out having to ship any knowledge off to distant servers.

As with its earlier designs, IceWhale is planning to crowdfund manufacturing of the ZimaCube on Kickstarter this week; the corporate can be providing a $1 “reservation” by itself retailer, which comes with the promise of a $200 saving on the ZimaCube, a $300 saving on the ZimaCube Professional, or a $400 saving on a bundle it calls the “Creator Pack.” Crucially, although, the corporate has but to substantiate the pricing of any mannequin, with particulars not anticipated till the crowdfunding marketing campaign’s launch.