The sun is setting on Intel’s next computing unit, the chipmaker’s minicomputers known as NUCs by their devotees.
“We have decided to discontinue direct investment in the Next Compute (NUC) business unit and direct our strategy to enable our ecosystem partners to continue innovation and growth in the NUC,” Intel spokespersons said. log today.
This decision will not affect the rest of the Client Computing Group (CCG) companies or the Networking and Edge Computing (NEX) companies.
“Products not officially launched will not be offered by Intel. While we finalize plans for a smooth transition, customers can continue to order NUC products through our distribution network through September 1, 2023, with shipping deadline expected on September 30, 2023. We will post an official Product Change Notice (PCN) for any affected products including timelines for EOL’s operation.”
Products that have not been officially launched by Intel will not be offered
The decision comes nearly three months after Intel announced that it would sell the division responsible for designing and planning server systems to Taiwanese manufacturer MiTAC. It appears this was only the beginning, and Intel now intends to separate itself from other system designs to focus on chip development and manufacturing.
Arriving in 2013 (original review here) Intel’s NUC micro-boxen crammed low-wattage, laptop-level silicon into a tiny 4×4-inch chassis, with two unpopulated SODIMM slots and room for an SSD or 2.5-inch SATA hard drive.
However, in the decade since, Intel’s NUCs have evolved to include larger, more powerful components optimized for gaming, edge applications, and IoT, often with unique motherboards and form factors.
Intel’s top-spec Raptor Canyon NUC, launched in November, features a full-size 13th Gen processor packed onto a motherboard that looks a lot like a PCIe card, including a connector on the bottom for detachment to external I/O, Accelerators or graphics processing units.
Intel was still pumping out NUCs at least until this spring with its Arena Canyon NUCs report back in March.
While slim personal computers can be used as such, personal computers have also become popular as low-power computing suites. For example, back in 2018 Chick-fil-A Hinge How the New Urban Communities were used as terminal nodes in their restaurants. Meanwhile, vendors such as Scale Computing are offering NUC communities preloaded with the Hyper-Convergence Infrastructure platform, again targeting high-end environments where power may be limited or latency is a factor.
Intel says it is working with its partners and customers to ensure a “smooth transition and fulfillment of all existing commitments,” including continued support for existing NUC products.
So far, we’ve detected only one end-of-life notification [PDF]published on Monday, is about the company’s older NUC 11 Compute Element, which will launch in 2021. It remains to be seen how long Intel will continue to support newer NUC systems.
The x86 titan’s decision to step away shouldn’t come as a surprise. We even speculated that the division might pick up the loss last fall after Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger pledged to cut $10 billion in annual spending. Combine that with the fact that the company has shipped 10 million NUC units over a decade, and the writing is on the wall.
And with fewer PCs being bought these days, Intel’s exit from this aspect of the PC market seems obvious.
Fortunately, there are plenty of small form factor PCs from the likes of Minisforum, Asus, MSI, HP, Lenovo, and others to fill the void. ®
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