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

[leadeater]

6 hours ago, Kisai said:

but too weak to actually run business software

Business software ranges from Word/Excel, to MSSQL Management Studio, to Oracle EnterpriseOne, to Visual Studio, to SolidWorks. The range is massive, not everything needs a GPU or even power CPU to be business software.

 

Also if it can run RDP then it can run anything, since published applications is also a thing. 

[Kisai]

6 hours ago, leadeater said:

Business software ranges from Word/Excel, to MSSQL Management Studio, to Oracle EnterpriseOne, to Visual Studio, to SolidWorks. The range is massive, not everything needs a GPU or even power CPU to be business software.

 

Also if it can run RDP then it can run anything, since published applications is also a thing. 

"that are based on electron"

 

The range may be massive, but the average user is getting a substandard experience. Like I kid you not, the engineering staff pretty much all needed the Precision 7xxx laptops because the Precision 5000's ran super-hot, but the business administration staff didn't seem to understand that a 12/14" laptop that was iGPU only was completely incapable of being used by engineers, and likewise engineers seemed to not know this either.

 

True story, an engineer tried to show a client something in AutoCAD on a 14" laptop that had no dGPU and the thing just completely died trying to do so.

 

The point being that the iGPU's are nowhere near capable to be used for most business software, and the trend is towards requiring more capable GPU's because companies keep switching to "web browser" based apps that require higher GPU requirements just by virtue of doing so.

 

Like, why does Microsoft Office or Spotify require a GPU? It shouldn't. But you know why it does? Because it needs to be able to play video. It needs to be able to render canvas. It needs to be able to run 3D software within the browser context. Why?  Why are these programs being written using webviews at all?

 

All they're doing is escalating the system requirements for no reason. And for what? What benefit do the users get from this? HiDPI support? Please.

[WolframaticAlpha]

39 minutes ago, Kisai said:

The point being that the iGPU's are nowhere near capable to be used for most business software

What you are talking about is more accurately professional engineering software. Business software typically is office, jira, quicken etc.

41 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Why are these programs being written using webviews at all?

Cross compat and shared codebase for mobile, pc etc. Saves an absolute fuckton of money and simplifies maintenance.

43 minutes ago, Kisai said:

why does Microsoft Office or Spotify require a GPU?

It doesn't. I'd be surprised if they did.

[WolframaticAlpha]

13 hours ago, Kisai said:

software built on Electron.

What electron apps are you running lol? If it stresses the iGPU, either the iGPU is some really old shit or it uses embedded libraries that use the GPU.

[Kisai]

3 hours ago, WolframaticAlpha said:

What electron apps are you running lol? If it stresses the iGPU, either the iGPU is some really old shit or it uses embedded libraries that use the GPU.

Staff being forced to use web version of Microsoft Office 365, complain and how slow it is. People held off switching to 365 for as long as possible because it crippled the skylake systems. It started to be a thing where we had to give the clerical staff who work in Excel the Precision 5520's. The very laptops the engineers couldn't do CAD work on.

 

[leadeater]

8 hours ago, Kisai said:

"that are based on electron"

Slack is Electron and works flawlessly on iGPUs of any kind

 

When you say business apps everyone is going to think of general office applications btw, not engineering software. I would never even put those applications under business software either, I wouldn't Visual Studio either normally but I had a feeling you meant something high end and not really what people associate with that phrase and what you were meaning.

 

8 hours ago, Kisai said:

Like, why does Microsoft Office

I have never needed a GPU using Office apps and my work computer doesn't have one and is only an Intel 9700.

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

Slack is Electron and works flawlessly on iGPUs of any kind

Many of the Electron stuff does not work well on iGPU's, Period. I'm not going to get into the weeds about this. The trend is towards needing more GPU power to do really stupid things that we shouldn't need to be kicking to the GPU. All these smooth scrolling eye candy BS is part of that.

 

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

When you say business apps everyone is going to think of general office applications btw,

And when I said business apps, I meant all of Microsoft's apps, and the trend towards discord-like applications which are basically just running old versions of chromium underneath.

 

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

not engineering software. I would never even put those applications under business software either, I wouldn't Visual Studio either normally but I had a feeling you meant something high end and not really what people associate with that phrase and what you were meaning.

Again, the place I was doing this work at, kept giving clerical staff these dinky 8GB RAM i7-6000/7000/8000/9000 iGPU-only systems and the only people who could actually use the damn things were the payroll and HR staff. Basically the people who spend most of the day in Outlook and Word.

 

The engineer's support staff, however had to open excel sheets that were so big that 8GB RAM was insufficient (basically engineering data that the files themselves were 200MB+.) Now add into the mix various performance costs of making outlook not look ugly.

 

The thing that annoyed the hell out of me is that I organized the tech room by how old the laptops were, and the minute the pandemic hit, everyone had to go home, and we basically had to re-deploy every 6th gen and 7th gen laptop in the place, and when those were gone, the 6th/7th gen 12"/14" laptops were all that was left, and I could not in good faith give those to the engineers. 

 

But had I not been doing work for them, that entire stack of 40 6th/7th gen laptops would have been sent to be recycled a year before the pandemic. I held onto them knowing perfectly well they would be good until DDR5 systems. You know what did get sent to be recycled? Anything with a 2nd/3rd gen CPU, because they had no SSD's in them.

 

Now what about the desktops? Somewhere in that office building is a room full of 6th gen desktops because they were better than the SFF's and could be re-deployed to people who want to work in the office. Had the "Intel NUC" been an option with a dGPU, that would have been a happy middle ground between deploying a mostly-empty tower and an engineering laptop. Alas, it was not to be, the IT people wanted to get everyone to use Dell laptops no matter what.

 

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

I have never needed a GPU using Office apps and my work computer doesn't have one and is only an Intel 9700.

You also have not worked with Engineers on billion dollar projects as far as I know. The example I was using was the staff on an energy-sector project. Sure, maybe it's an edge case, but it's not as much of an edge case as someone using Excel to play a chess game.

 

But even then, same problem with another manager using the 14" laptop, the guy spends all day with outlook open, and it takes actual seconds, sometimes minutes to to open outlook messages. I point out the obvious... "clean out your inbox", kinda amazing how difficult it is to do that on a laptop with no dGPU for some reason. But he would also point how slow it was to scroll web pages and do other things you wouldn't think needed a dGPU like opening PDF's in Adobe Acrobat.

 

But I digress, if you want to get work done, make sure the system has a dGPU that you can plug the monitors into. It's amazing how many times someone would move seats, and the plug the monitors into the iGPU ports instead of the dGPU.

 

[leadeater]

3 hours ago, Kisai said:

Again, the place I was doing this work at, kept giving clerical staff these dinky 8GB RAM i7-6000/7000/8000/9000 iGPU-only systems and the only people who could actually use the damn things were the payroll and HR staff. Basically the people who spend most of the day in Outlook and Word.

That doesn't at all sound like a problem to me since that is what they do and suits their requirements. Why spend more unnecessarily when computers of these specifications are well suited to these job roles?

 

If you need more sure that is perfectly valid but for example we don't hand out Tier 3 standard desktop configurations to all staff since they are 6x the cost and barely 5% need that. Our Tier 2 configuration is 12700 with 3070 and I'm not even sure more than 10% have been allocated that. The rest work very happily with a 12500T and 16BG ram.

 

3 hours ago, Kisai said:

You also have not worked with Engineers on billion dollar projects as far as I know.

I literally work in a university with every department type that exists and am responsible for the entire backend infrastructure of the university along with my team. I manage the storage infrastructure, I manage the VMware clusters, I manage the HPC clusters, I manage  network load balancers, I manage all the Windows and Linux operating system builds and management software as well as all patching.

 

It doesn't matter at all what you do or have done, not even a little when generalizing and saying people need XYZ when it's actually 2% of people, or more, or less depending on origination etc. But more often there are what are called knowledge workers in organizations than engineers or developers etc. 

 

Most systems if we are or you are going to generalize do not and will never need a dGPU. iGPUs have been working well for decades now and only get faster and aren't having problems with any applications that don't actually need a dGPU which is not most applications regardless of framework used to make them. Slack for example will never need a dGPU, no application like it will, Electron or otherwise.

 

Really I'm just saying be careful how much you want to brush stroke things, go too wide and you paint the wrong thing. It's actually really jarring to read "everyone needs a dGPU" when they in fact don't and won't. It actually makes people go "wait, what?!"

 

3 hours ago, Kisai said:

But he would also point how slow it was to scroll web pages and do other things you wouldn't think needed a dGPU like opening PDF's in Adobe Acrobat.

iGPU won't be the reason for that.

[WolframaticAlpha]

20 hours ago, Kisai said:

Staff being forced to use web version of Microsoft Office 365,

Wejrd. Anecdotal experience, but my dad uses an ancient sandy bridge system(an ancient Dell latitude ) with win10 and he can use O365 just fine. Maybe the overall system was bad? Because even on sandy bridge, he wasn't able to discern a performance drop.

14 hours ago, Kisai said:

Not getting in the weeds about this

Either your igpu has some weird hardware issues or the staff is drowning their PCs in macros. The iGPU wouldn't be on my list for the things that make office run slow lol. Electron uses a ton of memory, because it runs a blink engine in the background, but igpu strain is new

 

Also modern igpus are substantially better now. The Xe96 is as fast as a 1030 and rdna2 based ones that and ships can near the 1050 in perf 

14 hours ago, Kisai said:

and it takes actual seconds, sometimes minutes to

SSD dying? Network being shit? Modern Outlook being a dumpster fire?

11 hours ago, leadeater said:

Most systems if we are or you are going to generalize do not and will never need a dGPU. iGPUs have been working well for decades now and only get faster and aren't having problems with any applications that don't actually need a dGPU which is not most applications regardless of framework used to make them. Slack for example will never need a dGPU, no application like it will, Electron or otherwise.

True. Just go to dell.com and see how many latitudes have dGPUs. If iGPUs were wholly incapable of rendering basic applications like office, then why would IT departments all over the world inundate their staffs with iGPU models and why would Dell sell like 2 models with dGPU options? Even procurement isn't as cold hearted as that.

 

For some reason my phone keeps autocorrecting iGPU to dGPU

[porina]

Going way off topic, but usually the biggest hurdle to performance on a corporate PC is the information security software put on it. Seems a common policy to assume all users are idiots and you'll have plenty of anti-malware, firewall, software auditing, cloud backups and who knows what else is going on in the background. Due to the engineering nature of my past work I had a mix of on and off corporate network systems, and the off network ones performed way better.

[sof006]

There is already so many other Mini PC's out there, such as Minisforum. I have a HX80G from Minisforum and its great.

[Kisai]

10 hours ago, leadeater said:

 

Most systems if we are or you are going to generalize do not and will never need a dGPU. iGPUs have been working well for decades now and only get faster and aren't having problems with any applications that don't actually need a dGPU which is not most applications regardless of framework used to make them. Slack for example will never need a dGPU, no application like it will, Electron or otherwise.

 

Really I'm just saying be careful how much you want to brush stroke things, go too wide and you paint the wrong thing. It's actually really jarring to read "everyone needs a dGPU" when they in fact don't and won't. It actually makes people go "wait, what?!"

 

iGPU won't be the reason for that.

Slack does not need a dGPU "now", but running it on the cheapest system possible will not be a pleasant experience.

I've worked in places on both ends of that spectrum. The call center that staff only ever listened and transcribed phone calls, ran Windows 2000 on SFF's in 2006. Basically there was one custom-written program that ran inside MSIE and one program that actually ran on the computer called wavepad.

 

The Auction site used Sandy Bridge i7 desktops, and all their custom software was written with .NET frameworks or Java, and they used an old version of Macro Express to "macro" write template emails. They had two versions of the CRM software, one that was driven by HTML and an older version that was written in c++, this was third party software, and the HTML version was miserably slow. Like switch back to the C++ CRM and your productivity tripled.

 

The Engineering firm is the only one that seemed to pick high end computer replacements, but somehow the software management is substantially worse since it's all cloud managed. Where as the call centers above were one-size-fits-all, everyone ran the same thing, and no third party software was permitted to be installed. 

 

6 hours ago, porina said:

Going way off topic, but usually the biggest hurdle to performance on a corporate PC is the information security software put on it. Seems a common policy to assume all users are idiots and you'll have plenty of anti-malware, firewall, software auditing, cloud backups and who knows what else is going on in the background. Due to the engineering nature of my past work I had a mix of on and off corporate network systems, and the off network ones performed way better.

The engineering firm used the Symantec stuff and also had Microsoft SCCM stuff running in the background. Usually neither of those are an issue (don't get me started on how SCCM would take 4 hours to install the OS.)  But the corporate IT would set incorrect settings since they used a one-size-fits-everything approach. So the Engineering Precision Desktops running i7's and Xeon's had the same software as the i7 Latitudes. With the Pandemic a VPN program also was added to that mix.

 

 

[igormp]

14 hours ago, Kisai said:

Many of the Electron stuff does not work well on iGPU's, Period. I'm not going to get into the weeds about this. The trend is towards needing more GPU power to do really stupid things that we shouldn't need to be kicking to the GPU. All these smooth scrolling eye candy BS is part of that.

 

And when I said business apps, I meant all of Microsoft's apps, and the trend towards discord-like applications which are basically just running old versions of chromium underneath.

 

Again, the place I was doing this work at, kept giving clerical staff these dinky 8GB RAM i7-6000/7000/8000/9000 iGPU-only systems and the only people who could actually use the damn things were the payroll and HR staff. Basically the people who spend most of the day in Outlook and Word.

 

The engineer's support staff, however had to open excel sheets that were so big that 8GB RAM was insufficient (basically engineering data that the files themselves were 200MB+.) Now add into the mix various performance costs of making outlook not look ugly.

 

The thing that annoyed the hell out of me is that I organized the tech room by how old the laptops were, and the minute the pandemic hit, everyone had to go home, and we basically had to re-deploy every 6th gen and 7th gen laptop in the place, and when those were gone, the 6th/7th gen 12"/14" laptops were all that was left, and I could not in good faith give those to the engineers. 

 

But had I not been doing work for them, that entire stack of 40 6th/7th gen laptops would have been sent to be recycled a year before the pandemic. I held onto them knowing perfectly well they would be good until DDR5 systems. You know what did get sent to be recycled? Anything with a 2nd/3rd gen CPU, because they had no SSD's in them.

 

Now what about the desktops? Somewhere in that office building is a room full of 6th gen desktops because they were better than the SFF's and could be re-deployed to people who want to work in the office. Had the "Intel NUC" been an option with a dGPU, that would have been a happy middle ground between deploying a mostly-empty tower and an engineering laptop. Alas, it was not to be, the IT people wanted to get everyone to use Dell laptops no matter what.

 

You also have not worked with Engineers on billion dollar projects as far as I know. The example I was using was the staff on an energy-sector project. Sure, maybe it's an edge case, but it's not as much of an edge case as someone using Excel to play a chess game.

 

But even then, same problem with another manager using the 14" laptop, the guy spends all day with outlook open, and it takes actual seconds, sometimes minutes to to open outlook messages. I point out the obvious... "clean out your inbox", kinda amazing how difficult it is to do that on a laptop with no dGPU for some reason. But he would also point how slow it was to scroll web pages and do other things you wouldn't think needed a dGPU like opening PDF's in Adobe Acrobat.

 

But I digress, if you want to get work done, make sure the system has a dGPU that you can plug the monitors into. It's amazing how many times someone would move seats, and the plug the monitors into the iGPU ports instead of the dGPU.

 

Most (if not all) of the performance issues you're complaining about are either CPU or RAM related, and have nothing to do with having an iGPU or a dGPU.

 

For some engineering specific uses, like CAD stuff, yeah a dGPU helps a ton, but that's a really specific use case and not your regular "office" stuff.

[doubleflower]

On 7/11/2023 at 9:33 PM, 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.

...or one of those DIY styled Mini PCs from the likes of ASRock/Minisforum/Beelink

[doubleflower]

On 7/11/2023 at 9:23 PM, 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.

Yup, as a IT field tech I mostly see SFF pcs from the likes of Dell/HP/Lenovo, but not NUCs

[leadeater]

18 hours ago, igormp said:

Most (if not all) of the performance issues you're complaining about are either CPU or RAM related, and have nothing to do with having an iGPU or a dGPU.

 

For some engineering specific uses, like CAD stuff, yeah a dGPU helps a ton, but that's a really specific use case and not your regular "office" stuff.

Also in the case of laptops with dGPUs Windows along with web browsers and many other applications actually use the iGPU rather than the dGPU. And that is the case with or without a display mux to allow direct connection to the dGPU. iGPU is preferred for applications that do not invoke high performance requirement as well as Windows itself being able to control and override on a per application basis.

 

The same is also true for desktops with iGPU. If you want to prove what GPU is being used for an application open Task Manager and under Processes enable the GPU Engine column.

 

If an iGPU really is struggling it's probably a U series ultra low power mobile part and there isn't enough power to share between the CPU cores and the iGPU but I've personally never encountered such a situation, only overall outright too slow mobile parts like that pink laptop LTT tested with garbage Celeron in it.

 

18 hours ago, Kisai said:

Slack does not need a dGPU "now", but running it on the cheapest system possible will not be a pleasant experience.

It won't ever need one, Slack does indeed call for 3D resources but Windows will always allocate it to an iGPU if it exists because it's not making a high power 3D resource call. Even if a system has a dGPU Slack will be using the iGPU, outside of video and voice calls but that'll actually use the iGPU if there is one and any iGPU in the last 10 years can do both tasks no issue.

 

There is a clear difference between a cheap low end system with an under powered CPU or not enough ram and needing a dGPU. To need a dGPU you actually have to have an application that will use it and outside of going in to Windows settings and overriding the per application GPU selection Slack will always pick the iGPU unless they put in to the application itself to request dGPU resource which there is no reason I could ever think they would do that. It's a communication and collaboration application that is primarily text that has video and voice capability which as a above work perfectly fine on iGPU hardware acceleration paths. 

 

Of course you are right that modern applications have gotten more graphically demanding and a pain in the ass but most of the wizzy wig crap on web form applications is CPU rendered not GPU. So if you have an application that is delivered by browser or is just a browser engine under the hood then odds are it's all CPU.

[ImorallySourcedElectrons]

I'm kind of sad to see these go. To folks saying they didn't make sense, I think Intel simply targeted the wrong market, they had plenty of use in an industrial setting because they were relatively cheap and could run in really atrocious conditions. They claim 40°C, but you can run them at far higher temperatures if you go for the ruggedized versions (like these: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/boards-kits/nuc/mini-pcs/industrial.html ) and slap on an external fan, and they cost a fraction of the cost of one of those Siemens industrial PCs that end up costing €8k a piece. We often had them sitting inside machines to run additional sensors or gather new data. They're powerful enough to run something like LabVIEW or MATLAB, and paired with the right DAQ hardware they were really nice for that job. And sure, there are substitutes on the market, but kind of sad to see one of the better options go.

 

17 hours ago, Kisai said:

The Engineering firm is the only one that seemed to pick high end computer replacements, but somehow the software management is substantially worse since it's all cloud managed. Where as the call centers above were one-size-fits-all, everyone ran the same thing, and no third party software was permitted to be installed. 

 

The engineering firm used the Symantec stuff and also had Microsoft SCCM stuff running in the background. Usually neither of those are an issue (don't get me started on how SCCM would take 4 hours to install the OS.)  But the corporate IT would set incorrect settings since they used a one-size-fits-everything approach. So the Engineering Precision Desktops running i7's and Xeon's had the same software as the i7 Latitudes. With the Pandemic a VPN program also was added to that mix.

What I usually find annoying is that most of the time management wants a better computer than the engineering staff, while they don't actually need it. So we're always stuck with mediocre laptops missing memory or a dedicated GPU that's actually rated for the software we use, and then they think we want 13" screen size, while in reality we want a proper desktop with beefy hardware and a mediocre 15" laptop with a good screen to remote into said desktop.

[Kisai]

13 hours ago, ImorallySourcedElectrons said:

 

What I usually find annoying is that most of the time management wants a better computer than the engineering staff, while they don't actually need it. So we're always stuck with mediocre laptops missing memory or a dedicated GPU that's actually rated for the software we use, and then they think we want 13" screen size, while in reality we want a proper desktop with beefy hardware and a mediocre 15" laptop with a good screen to remote into said desktop.

That was sometimes the case. The management staff who only had to open CAD drawings for clients, had the 15" and 17" precision laptops where as, again, the clerical staff typically had the 12"/14" latitudes. If it were up to me, nobody would have latitude's, because they had the worst battery problems. At the bare minimum, Precision 3570, because that way if an engineer takes one to a client, they can at least open autocad and not have it melt. It would still be a pathetic experience, but at least they wouldn't be embarrassed in front of the client and potentially losing project funding when the client sees you can't even open a CAD drawing.

 

At any rate, my experience was real and still stands. When money is in play, be that Engineering or Film. Your staff need good equipment, not "the bare minimum", because otherwise you may be torpedoing your project by giving the impression to the client that you don't know what you're doing.

 

[Forbidden Wafer]

On 7/13/2023 at 6:47 PM, Kisai said:

Staff being forced to use web version of Microsoft Office 365, complain and how slow it is. People held off switching to 365 for as long as possible because it crippled the skylake systems. It started to be a thing where we had to give the clerical staff who work in Excel the Precision 5520's. The very laptops the engineers couldn't do CAD work on.

 

Web office is horrible. Absolute shit for reasonably small documents, and hell for large ones.

 

I recently had to work in a huge report (300+ pages), and it is painful to use that. And if you don't use it, sync breaks and you lose your work. When syncing breaks, not even the backups work. They simply get deleted in the process of merge conflict resolution. 

[ImorallySourcedElectrons]

6 hours ago, Kisai said:

That was sometimes the case. The management staff who only had to open CAD drawings for clients, had the 15" and 17" precision laptops where as, again, the clerical staff typically had the 12"/14" latitudes. If it were up to me, nobody would have latitude's, because they had the worst battery problems. At the bare minimum, Precision 3570, because that way if an engineer takes one to a client, they can at least open autocad and not have it melt. It would still be a pathetic experience, but at least they wouldn't be embarrassed in front of the client and potentially losing project funding when the client sees you can't even open a CAD drawing.

 

At any rate, my experience was real and still stands. When money is in play, be that Engineering or Film. Your staff need good equipment, not "the bare minimum", because otherwise you may be torpedoing your project by giving the impression to the client that you don't know what you're doing.

 

Try running AutoCAD on an XPS 13 like I had to do at a previous employer, it took off into low earth orbit if you dared to hover your mouse in proximity of the shortcut, the damned thing just thermal throttled within the first ten seconds and was then unbearable to use. Got better with an eGPU, but not by much.

[NumLock21]

The thing with Intel NUC is, they never really promoted it that much. I meant, you don't see ads in electronic stores or anywhere. The only ones that knows about them are ones like US, from tech news, outside of that, not many had heard of them. The other thing is the way they made the products, there are 2 types, standard and gaming. Standard ones, due to lack of promotion, this thing technically don't exist. Gaming one, it's hard to justify getting one, when you can DIY, where it lets you use standard off the shelf parts.

[ImAlsoRan]

The NUCs were pretty popular in the production industry, especially in lighting design. They've become the de facto standard for PC-based lighting (i.e. grandMA 2/3, Hog 4 PC) and they're solidly built machines we can count on and recommend. For reference, this was the previous standard machine.

[Brooksie359]

5 hours ago, NumLock21 said:

The thing with Intel NUC is, they never really promoted it that much. I meant, you don't see ads in electronic stores or anywhere. The only ones that knows about them are ones like US, from tech news, outside of that, not many had heard of them. The other thing is the way they made the products, there are 2 types, standard and gaming. Standard ones, due to lack of promotion, this thing technically don't exist. Gaming one, it's hard to justify getting one, when you can DIY, where it lets you use standard off the shelf parts.

I feel like it's hard to justify a use case for the NUC that can't be satisfied with a laptop or desktop. I mean I can't think of how the NUC would be better than a laptop fir most use cases. Sure there are some upsides for the NUC bit I can see alot more benefits from a laptop especially because you can actually use a laptop on the go and if you want to use it as a desktop there are plenty of laptops out there that can use a docking station to act as a portable pc.