Intel exiting the PC Business as it stops investment in the Intel NUC

[26astr00]

 

Summary

Intel nuked the NUC.

 

(More seriously: Intel will stop making NUC products and hopes its partners will step up to take over the mini-PC space.)

 

Quotes

Quote

We have decided to stop direct investment in the Next Unit of Compute (NUC) Business and pivot our strategy to enable our ecosystem partners to continue NUC innovation and growth. This decision will not impact the remainder of Intel’s Client Computing Group (CCG) or Network and Edge Computing (NEX) businesses. Furthermore, we are working with our partners and customers to ensure a smooth transition and fulfillment of all our current commitments.

 

My thoughts

 It's a shame given they were doing a pretty good job at it. Hope more manufacturers join the mini-PC space going forward.

 

Sources

https://videocardz.com/newz/intel-sunsets-next-unit-of-compute-nuc-product-line

[DuckDodgers]

Following the sell of its server business to MiTAC, the axe has come for the small form factor PC (NUC) division of the company.

 

Quotes

Quote

Intel NUCs are awesome. These mini PCs have really defined a space serving as everything from desktops to portable VMware/ Ubuntu/ and other enterprise software cluster nodes, to even being the backbone of Enterprise Restaurant Compute with Kubernetes at Chick-fil-A. The small size, and to be very frank, Intel’s support of the platform has made them very popular. There is a gap between the support experience with an Intel NUC and many of the mini PC vendors that exist today.

 

Over the years, the Intel NUC line has expanded to much larger form factors, even encompassing Intel Xeon CPUs in chassis large enough to have GPUs as well. If anything the NUC line has grown over the years from small boxes to all kinds of form factors.

 

That has led to a strange market dynamic. As it was doing in the server business, Intel was in a position to compete with its major OEM customers. That brings us to the key question: does Intel add value by competing on motherboard and chassis design, rather than chip design? For the past few years as the mini PC space has flourished perhaps the answer has been no.

 

As Intel focuses on streamlining its business, it seems like those parts of the organization that are not core to making and selling chips are being slowly sunset or sold off, which is not out of the industry trends of internal consolidation of the business divisions. The OEM market is more than capable of absorbing the demand for SFF boxes.

 

Source: https://www.servethehome.com/intel-exiting-the-pc-business-as-it-stops-investment-in-the-intel-nuc/

[Levent]

What is actually surprising is that they stuck with NUC business for this long. They had some cool products but I personally never seen NUCs deployed or even seen one with my own eyes.

[WolframaticAlpha]

7 minutes ago, Levent said:

What is actually surprising is that they stuck with NUC business for this long. They had some cool products but I personally never seen NUCs deployed or even seen one with my own eyes.

Yeah, cool product but limited usecase, considering that you could often buy whilelaptops with the same specs for prices that weren't much higher, or buy a substantially more powerful PC. The niche ofnpeople who arent buyingmac minis or raspi or older sff's from eBay(Dell, Lenovo, hp etc)is small.

[Senzelian]

14 minutes ago, WolframaticAlpha said:

Yeah, cool product but limited usecase, considering that you could often buy whilelaptops with the same specs for prices that weren't much higher, or buy a substantially more powerful PC. The niche ofnpeople who arent buyingmac minis or raspi or older sff's from eBay(Dell, Lenovo, hp etc)is small.

NUC customers were usually business customers. They were used in a large number for meeting rooms and such.

 

23 minutes ago, Levent said:

What is actually surprising is that they stuck with NUC business for this long. They had some cool products but I personally never seen NUCs deployed or even seen one with my own eyes.

I've seen plenty of them, but they all got replaced during the covid pandemic with better and cheaper hardware from Lenovo.

I actually have one running next to me right now.

[porina]

I saw Intel's NUCs as more like a demonstrator device than a serious product offering, in that it was never intended for volume. Now that the door has been opened there are many offerings in that space in the general market, so there isn't a real need for Intel to keep making them.

[NinJake]

Sad times. I've deployed many NUCs across our organization. Half of the "third party" vendors that sell their variant of the mini-pc form factor don't seem to have as good of quality control, and when/if there's ever an issue that could turn into RMA status... it's tough getting in contact with someone and when you do, takes weeks to get something resolved.

 

So.. on the topic. What do you all recommend as a good contender in the "mini pc" market? All of the ASUS ones seem sold out at the moment. What Lenovo are you referring to, @Senzelian?

 

33 minutes ago, Levent said:

They had some cool products but I personally never seen NUCs deployed or even seen one with my own eyes.

This is because they are so small they fit anywhere out of sight!

[Senzelian]

30 minutes ago, NinJake said:

So.. on the topic. What do you all recommend as a good contender in the "mini pc" market? All of the ASUS ones seem sold out at the moment. What Lenovo are you referring to, @Senzelian?

Lenovo ThinkCentre. Lenovo offers many different versions starting from around 200€.

I think the Q series is the small one, not sure, but you'll see what I mean when searching for them.

 

They all look like this:

 

Edit:
I actually just noticed you were also deploying NUCs or used to. Either way, one device that might be interesting to anyone deploying them for meeting rooms is the Lenovo Think Smart Hub:

 

We have thousands of these deployed and they all work great for small to medium sized Teams meeting rooms.

 

[Taf the Ghost]

They're in a bunch of products you'd have to remove the cases to see. Seen them in a number of spots, but this isn't surprising. When they got stuck on 14nm, they expanded a lot of other businesses beyond what they really should have done.  Though I suspect they'll still make reference board designs for the space, they'll just not produce full products themselves.  i.e. the Nvidia/AMD model.

[Thomas4]

Don't worry, give it about 5 years and they'll be back in the computer manufacturing business. They and most every other businesses, especially  manufacturers go through trends due to popularity(and ego).

[Commodus]

41 minutes ago, NinJake said:

So.. on the topic. What do you all recommend as a good contender in the "mini pc" market?

If it's a home system (or even a work machine), a Mac mini — no kidding. Speedy for the size, compact and extremely quiet. The M2 Pro version is even quick enough for some serious creative work.

 

With that said, for edge computing or similar tasks... go with a mini PC from Lenovo and other brands. The Mac mini can be used for some services like that, but it's not really meant for them.

[da na]

1 hour ago, Levent said:

What is actually surprising is that they stuck with NUC business for this long. They had some cool products but I personally never seen NUCs deployed or even seen one with my own eyes.

I've only ever seen one NUC, there seems to be no market for real NUCs anymore with the sheer amount of cheap Windows mini PCs

[LogicalDrm]

@26astr00 @DuckDodgers

I've merged your threads. As both are bit lacking on personal input part of our guidelines and posted within 10 minutes, can't really give credit to either.

[Mark Kaine]

Well thats a shame, those were pretty good high end mini pcs with a unique look, better than Dell Alienware for sure! 

[Techstorm970]

6 hours ago, Levent said:

What is actually surprising is that they stuck with NUC business for this long. They had some cool products but I personally never seen NUCs deployed or even seen one with my own eyes.

I have.  The Taco Bell I worked at in high school used one of the tiny Celeron NUCs to power their drive-thru & kitchen displays.

 

None of them ran well but that wasn't really the NUC's fault.

[Kisai]

9 hours ago, porina said:

I saw Intel's NUCs as more like a demonstrator device than a serious product offering, in that it was never intended for volume. Now that the door has been opened there are many offerings in that space in the general market, so there isn't a real need for Intel to keep making them.

I saw it as a way for them to leverage the laptop parts to try and sell them as desktops. Unfortunately, as always, Intel still fails to realize the iGPU offering is a colossal joke and a "NUC" device has barely utility without a dGPU. Even "business" SFF systems are only barely better than the same chip in a 12-14" laptop. 

 

Ultimately I never saw a reason why someone would buy one of these over a laptop except to maybe get a better cooling option that makes less noise.

[Ydfhlx]

IIRC they also exited the storage and server market, but are entering the GPU market, and possibly also chip manufacturing market (as a subcontractor).

 

Interesting direction changes under new management. Although I guess it makes sense. Intel is a chip company, and they want to focus on that instead of whole systems.

 

Especially given that Intel was only in a small subset of the system integrator market, putting them at a disadvantage compared to larger players.

[williamcll]

NUCs were always overpriced in the miniPC space.

[porina]

7 hours ago, Kisai said:

I saw it as a way for them to leverage the laptop parts to try and sell them as desktops. Unfortunately, as always, Intel still fails to realize the iGPU offering is a colossal joke and a "NUC" device has barely utility without a dGPU. Even "business" SFF systems are only barely better than the same chip in a 12-14" laptop. 

 

Ultimately I never saw a reason why someone would buy one of these over a laptop except to maybe get a better cooling option that makes less noise.

What is the use case you're thinking of? From other's posts in this thread it seems they have found utility in some business cases. For much general business use, heavy 3D performance is simply not needed. The form factor also plays a part, and a laptop may simply be unsuitable for many use cases.

[leadeater]

4 minutes ago, porina said:

What is the use case you're thinking of? From other's posts in this thread it seems they have found utility in some business cases. For much general business use, heavy 3D performance is simply not needed. The form factor also plays a part, and a laptop may simply be unsuitable for many use cases.

POS terminal in a small room used to sell things like stationary or uniforms at a school with a monitor securely mounted on a VESA arm. A laptop isn't a replacement for that and is just going to get damaged. Laptops really are personal devices more than shared or kiosk.

[WolframaticAlpha]

20 hours ago, Senzelian said:

NUC customers were usually business customers. They were used in a large number for meeting rooms and such.

Never ever seen an Intel NUC for that. Most of them would use something from Lenovo or Dell.

[Senzelian]

3 minutes ago, WolframaticAlpha said:

Never ever seen an Intel NUC for that. Most of them would use something from Lenovo or Dell.

We had NUCs running for meeting rooms, digital signage and training rooms for over 110k employees. So yeah, definitely used for that.

[rpgnoob]

RE: Innovation in the small form factor e.g. Intel Xeon, and recently the popular (sold out in UK) all-NVME ASUSTOR NAS

 

I think with Intel leaving the space, and thus sales numbers (scaling production up = lower production cost per unit), revenue & potential profits, will open up the space for some more innovation and risk taking by ODMs and OEMs together.

 

I, for one, would love to buy a silent small form factor, capable all-NVMe NAS, for a document SMB, with configurable RAM and CPU (to spin up a VM, for some docker images) and space for 2 slot GPU for plex/jellyfin acceleration. The new ASUSTOR version without the configurability is a good start, but not good enough for the enthusiast space: people would love to have a homelab server, but don't have the space, and would not be able to tolerate the heat and noise from a refurbished workstation or 2U server. Not everyone under 40 in the EU has a McMansion and cheap electricity. #GenerationRent #Flatshare   

[Kisai]

21 hours ago, porina said:

What is the use case you're thinking of? From other's posts in this thread it seems they have found utility in some business cases. For much general business use, heavy 3D performance is simply not needed. The form factor also plays a part, and a laptop may simply be unsuitable for many use cases.

Thinking of the use case of pairing one with a RTX 3070/4070 to use in engineering setups. Like NUC's are actually too overpowered with the iGPU to use a thin-client, but too weak to actually run business software on them when the GPU performance is too weak to operate the web browser and software built on Electron.

 

[porina]

2 hours ago, Kisai said:

Thinking of the use case of pairing one with a RTX 3070/4070 to use in engineering setups.

I used to run an acoustic test lab in my last job. Fixed systems that cared about performance had desktops. The only NUCs that could fit in this use case are the taller ones with a daughterboard and dGPU in SFF case, but that's pretty niche for volume reduction. More flexible uses were laptops with iGPU only.

 

The few engineers that actually ran simulations got desktop replacement class laptops.

 

2 hours ago, Kisai said:

Like NUC's are actually too overpowered with the iGPU to use a thin-client, but too weak to actually run business software on them when the GPU performance is too weak to operate the web browser and software built on Electron.

The vast majority of business laptops run iGPU. It's plenty for web apps.