"Apparently, the appetite for performance at the IoT edge knows no boundaries," said CompuLab's Irad Stavi in a press statement. "We are seeing remarkable performance gains in the latest generation of CPUs and GPUs, but with great power comes greater power consumption. However, our engineers were able to improve the thermal headroom of Airtop3's Natural Airflow cooling by over 30 percent so there was no need to settle for low power chips. This makes Airtop3 a small-form-factor fanless IoT edge server with unprecedented performance."

Stavi went on to point out that the Airtop3 is, in fact, almost twice as powerful and its predecessor. That translates to Intel Core i9-9900K brains with Intel UHD 630 graphics, but it's also reported ready to receive Intel's Xeon E processors. Up to 128 GB of DDR4 RAM can be accommodated, and storage is made up of six components as standard – two NMVe SSDs at up to 2 TB each and four 2.5-inch HDDs or SSDs. Users are also offered handy tool-free access to the inside of the aluminum chassis.

The Airtop3 comes with dual gigabit Ethernet LAN, two DisplayPort 1.2 and HDMI 1.4 connections, six USB 3.1 gen 1 Type A ports around back, with three more USB ports to the front – specifically gen 2 Type C, gen 2 Type A and gen 1 Type A – and three RS232 serial ports.