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ASUS to manufacture and sell Intel’s NUC products

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

#211

I think the influx of very low cost Chinese mini PCs makes the NUC, Asus PN and Asrock devices a bit less attractive. Also thelow power AMD APU has been very good for the form factor. Maybe the margins are too tight for Intel. Another take maybe that the NUC came in when low power Arm desktops looked viable and Intel needed a low power small form factor to defend against that. The Minisforum, Beelink and the generic…

I wonder what impact they really have. I have always bought NUC though traditional IT market channels and we us them in the SMB market pretty heavily

I can not see any of these VAR's carrying minisforum or other generic aliexpress systems. So from an SMB stand point my options are NUC, Lenovo Tiny/Micro, and the simliar offerings from Dell and HP.

Maybe some Asus, Asrock, Gigabyte, etc.. Higher end consumer brands.

So I guess it comes down to how many NUC's are being sold in business channels vs the budget consumer channels

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

#214
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you already run ARM Linux VMs, it’s not much differences. The VMs host will run macOS instead of Linux but that’s not the end of the world.

As if the typical use case is to run ARM Linux VMs... But fine. The typical solution, if VMs are your use case, is to use a hypervisor, such as XCP-NG, proxmox, ESXi etc. But if you want to shoehorn in OS X just for the sake of it, sure, that will work. But I guess you'd have to be pretty deep into apples ecosystem to even consider that. And with VMs you typically want RAM and disk-space, and if you pick such a close…

If most of the devops people already use macs, it’s not too crazy.

But that’s a good point. I would say that we are in the DIY infrastructure world as deploying VMs on a Mac mini or NUC isn’t really following the industry best practices, but installing proxmox on a amd64 box is probably easier.

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

#215
post #26

How is ASUS build quality these days?

Hard to tell, but here's some anecdata:

I cooked the LCD panel in my ASUS G14 laptop because apparently sleep mode means 100% CPU mode.

Some bits of hardware are great(like the chassis and heat sinks - with a Ryzen 4800HS you can browse the internet with fans shut off through third party software), some suck(e.g. keyboard lighting, LCD back cover), but overall for me it's the firmware that spoils everything.

Battery charging limit sometimes works, sometimes doesn't, so I occasionally end up with a full charge, because that's apparently governed by the aptly named MyASUS app which may or may not actually work on any given day.

I took the opportunity to repaste the thing when I broke the fans(available only via AliExpress - the official parts store doesn't have anything useful), because after less than two years the paste was already flaking, causing overheating.

I "solved" the problem of the iGPU going at 100% frequency at all times by setting the dGPU as the preferred one(!) - achieving a jump from 2.5h to 5h battery life, when it used to be close to 10h before firmware/OS updates. The culprits could be: ASUS, Windows or AMD - no idea which though.

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

#216

Where is the ARM equivalent or put another way budget Linux Apple Mini competitor?

Raspberry Pi and its various competitors... the problem is you can't just go and buy ARM CPUs or boards if you're not either willing to upfront serious amounts of cash or have personal relations to Qualcomm and friends (which is how RPi got their in).

You have a couple top tier vendors when it comes to actually performant SoCs:

- Apple, which exclusively produces for their own lineup, and has inarguably the best-performing chips by far in raw performance and power efficiency to a tune they're outperforming Intel

- Samsung, which use (almost) all their production for their own phones, tablets and TVs - I'm not aware of Samsung SoCs ending up in any third party product

- Annapurna Labs, which belong to Amazon for a few years now, and whose SoCs end up being used in servers (both AWS themselves and third parties, QNAP uses a fair few of their models)

- Qualcomm and Broadcom, who won't return your calls unless you're talking millions of dollars in volume, have all their documentation behind NDAs and have serious deviations from any kind of standards which is what makes supporting them in Android forks a huge pain in the ass, and even the RPi chipset lacks behind severely in something as basic as PCIe, see e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27150697

- Mediatek and Rockchip which are even worse than the above two regarding documentation/standards/BSP quality, but you seem to stand a chance acquiring one of their chips even if you're small volume - almost all el-cheapo/gongkai devices and RPi competitors are based on their chips

- NVIDIA with their Tegra lineup which seems to be used only on the Nintendo Switch, a few settop boxes and automotive

That's more than in the x86/64 ecosystem on paper, where the only players left in town are Intel and AMD... but these are based on some common standardized core around BIOS/UEFI/PCI, there is no such thing in the entire ARM space. If you want to design a device using ARM, you're left either relying on a more-or-less open BSP from the vendor or doing everything including the bootloader yourself, and it's left to each SoC/board vendor on how to wire stuff like sensors (yes, I'm aware of device trees, but they don't come close to the easiness of x86/64). In total, it's a fuckton of work for very low gain as the market share for desktop ARM (Apple aside) just isn't there.

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

#217
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another happy PN51 user (R7 4700U) - I've found it to be quite the mighty mite working with big NetBeans projects. I'm honestly not surprised that Asus would pick up the NUC line.

The pn51 didn’t ship with a 4700. You’re either using a pn50 or 5700

Oops, you're right, it's a PN50. Anyway, I'm still impressed with this little guy.

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

#218
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did PN51 come with networking supported by default? When I got my PN50 some time ago, it couldn't connect to either wireless or wired networks and there was no indication which manufacturer's driver was required without some disassembly. I also loved how they shipped a CD with a computer that has no means of reading it with included drivers, so that was completely unhelpful. Why is installing drivers still a thing in…

Yeah both worked without any manual intervention. Was positively surprised of how smooth it went.

Fedora 37 is working smoothly on mine.

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

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now you've got me thinking of a hardware freemium model where you get some freebie IoT device on your home network, and its neural net convinces you to start paying its subscription fee (implemented with blockchain) once you're feeling done putting up with some limitation of the free version.

This was all the rage back in 1999. ISPs we’re giving away “free” eMachines with the purchase of a 3 year MSN dialup subscription.

Also Juno and Netzero giving internet access for watching ads.
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