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ASUS to manufacture and sell Intel’s NUC products

intel.com

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Re: ASUS to manufacture and sell Intel’s NUC products

#51

Post by ggm »

lmz wrote: post #39
ggm wrote: post #21

Dear ASUS: please make a range of NUC with either on-board 4+ SATA lanes or a PCIx instance which can take a daughtercard which does true parallel SATA, not serialised. TL;DR the market for home RAID/NAS is huge. We need you to stop needing us to max out with only 1 device, and sometimes M.2 keying isn't where we are. People are well beyond "2 disks is enough" in a home NAS now. thanksbai.

Looking at the bandwidth numbers a PCIe 3 x4 slot (like those used for M.2 slots) should be good for 4x SATA 3 ports, no "serialization" required. There's this https://www.tomshardware.com/news/silverstone-turns-one-m2-s... but it's only x2 and theoretically a bottleneck.

Thats my hope. So I may be "meh, we've moved on, M.2 is the universal glue" about this now.

Re: ASUS to manufacture and sell Intel’s NUC products

#52

Post by questionable922 »

ChumpGPT wrote: post #44
jojobas wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of things would work at 2x-4x the NUC price, even without the Apple lock-in.

Costco occasionally has sales on Mac Mini for $299.00 (M1 Mac Mini). Right now a Mac mini – Apple M2 Chip 8-core CPU, 10-core GPU – 8GB Memory – 256GB SSD – Silver is $499 Hard pressed to buy a decent NUC for less.

They would have to run Mac OS, and that's likely a no sale for many people.

There is Asahi Linux, however it's not really ready for day to day use, by comparison it would make the amount of time an Arch Linuxer spends trickering seem trivial in a business setting.

Also for many a large benefit of the NUC was the ability to swap out persistence and memory at will, supported, warrantied, and in most non-starter kits what you had to do. Mac minis is soldered everything.

Re: ASUS to manufacture and sell Intel’s NUC products

#53

Post by o1y32 »

nextos wrote: post #36
RandomBK wrote: post #5

I find the development quite interesting, and it lends credence to the theory Intel's NUC line was technically profitable (or at least not horrifically in the red), but just didn't make strategic sense - especially from a 'competing with your own customers' view. While I never bought one of these NUCs myself, I've used quite a few deployed as thin clients and kiosk machines. Let's see what ASUS ends up doing with the…

With one of the third party cases, such as those from Akasa, they are nice inexpensive fanless machines with excellent Linux support and low power consumption.

I would remove the word "inexpensive". Many alternatives cost less. I know people buy Intel for brand, quality and warranty but definitely not price.

Re: ASUS to manufacture and sell Intel’s NUC products

#54

Post by midoridensha »

dboreham wrote: post #43
hotpotamus wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really know how computers are made so I assumed that ASUS or someone like them was already the OEM for most of a NUC anyway. I didn't think Intel had any ability to make anything other than chips.

> I didn't think Intel had any ability to make anything other than chips. Historically this was definitely not the case. Intel made board level products in house, and systems for code development, ICE units etc. These days, probably it is all outsourced.

Intel never made board-level stuff in-house; no one does this in fact. It's always outsourced to a contract manufacturer that specializes in PCBs. Intel probably did their own PCB design however.

Re: ASUS to manufacture and sell Intel’s NUC products

#55

Post by asciimov »

adastra22 wrote: post #28
bfdm wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been using a NUC as an HTPC for several years now and it's great, though the comments in the previous conversation about them ending the line were right about the noise. I'm in the market for a similar device to replace my dangerously past EOL desktop, and funny enough I have been circling around Asus' SFF line.

Would a Mac mini work?

Biggest problem with the Mac mini is it has no user upgradable parts, nuc does.

Re: ASUS to manufacture and sell Intel’s NUC products

#56

Post by KAMSPioneer »

Jabihjo wrote: post #46

I'm looking forward to this! A couple of years ago, I had decided to upgrade my self hosted solutions after running two NUCs non-stop that are almost ten years old (and still running!). Unfortunately, I decided to go cheap with the upgrade and I bought two Minisforum computers, and one of them decided to crap out after just 6 months. No word from support yet. I want to believe that I would have gotten much better sup…

My experience with a NUC that died about 18 months into a two-year warranty was pretty good. It took a while to do all the tests they wanted, but the responses were usually same-day from Intel's side. In the end I got a replacement, whole thing took maybe two weeks (partially me being slow doing all the tests for an issue I knew needed an RMA but c'est la vie).

Shame to hear about Minisforum though.

Re: ASUS to manufacture and sell Intel’s NUC products

#57

Post by o1y32 »

dev_slash_null wrote: post #17
bigyikes wrote: post #3

It's hard to take ASUS seriously with a quote like: > this collaboration will enhance and accelerate our vision for the mini PC – greatly expanding our footprint in areas such as AI and AIoT It's just dripping in buzzword doublespeak. The NUCs seem like cool devices, do we really have to shoehorn "AI" and -- I had to re-read this -- "AIoT" into everything?

I use a Nuc clone to run Home Assistant, and AI event detection for my camera network (assisted by a Coral accelerator). So I think it legitimately qualifies for those buzzwords.

Except that almost nobody except random people on HN or certain reddit communities set up their own server for home assistant. Your personal interest and effort in this area really doesn't mean anything in the grand scheme of things -- I'm sure Asus and Intel marketing people weren't thinking about users like you when they wrote those words.

Re: ASUS to manufacture and sell Intel’s NUC products

#58

Post by j45 »

bfdm wrote: post #25
RandomBK wrote: post #5

I find the development quite interesting, and it lends credence to the theory Intel's NUC line was technically profitable (or at least not horrifically in the red), but just didn't make strategic sense - especially from a 'competing with your own customers' view. While I never bought one of these NUCs myself, I've used quite a few deployed as thin clients and kiosk machines. Let's see what ASUS ends up doing with the…

I have been using a NUC as an HTPC for several years now and it's great, though the comments in the previous conversation about them ending the line were right about the noise. I'm in the market for a similar device to replace my dangerously past EOL desktop, and funny enough I have been circling around Asus' SFF line.

Lenovo has the thinkcentre line

Dell has the optiplex

Go has the elitedesk and pro desk

All in mini/usff formfactor similar to the size of a Mac mini.

Re: ASUS to manufacture and sell Intel’s NUC products

#59

Post by j45 »

kodah wrote: post #34
RandomBK wrote: post #5

I find the development quite interesting, and it lends credence to the theory Intel's NUC line was technically profitable (or at least not horrifically in the red), but just didn't make strategic sense - especially from a 'competing with your own customers' view. While I never bought one of these NUCs myself, I've used quite a few deployed as thin clients and kiosk machines. Let's see what ASUS ends up doing with the…

I use a Skull Canyon as my daily driver for programming and honestly I wouldn't have selected another machine.

I waisted for the successor to skull canyon so long I just bought a Lenovo lol.

Re: ASUS to manufacture and sell Intel’s NUC products

#60

Post by duskwuff »

midoridensha wrote: post #54
dboreham wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I didn't think Intel had any ability to make anything other than chips. Historically this was definitely not the case. Intel made board level products in house, and systems for code development, ICE units etc. These days, probably it is all outsourced.

Intel never made board-level stuff in-house; no one does this in fact. It's always outsourced to a contract manufacturer that specializes in PCBs. Intel probably did their own PCB design however.

> Intel probably did their own PCB design however.

They do. I've heard rumors that some motherboard manufacturers don't have the skills in-house to design and simulate high-speed portions of the PCB (like the memory bus) themselves; they use Intel (or AMD) reference designs for that portion of the board.

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