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

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Re: Intel exiting the PC business as it stops investment in the Intel NUC

#171

Post by justsomehnguy »

pavlov wrote: post #148
jychang wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly suspect the iMac sells less than the Mac mini.

Just from anecdotal observation, the iMac seems to have several niches where a fashionable desktop is called for: at least higher-end shops and lobbies, and musicians and other artists who dabble in production enough to need the larger screen but not enough to invest in a more expensive setup. The Mini seems more specialized. I’ve bought many of them over the years for things like video installations, but I never see…

> “regular people use”.

For quite some years I just said "buy a notebook and (if you really need it) monitor with keyboard/ mouse".

With an SSD and a decent amount of RAM any notebook is fine for 95% of what people want from the home computer, with a small exception of gaming with a better settings than low/middle.

At this point nor Mini, nor any other SFF 'desktop' doesn't make sense, because you can't take it with you if you need.

Re: Intel exiting the PC business as it stops investment in the Intel NUC

#172

Post by gowld »

nextos wrote: post #161
Aromasin wrote: post #140

Funny enough, I predicted this in a previous HZ comment 3 months ago when they cut their server systems business. > "My guess is that they're cutting the portfolio down to feature only chipsets and add-in cards. Just CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, ASICs, networking. It makes sense if anything - it really focuses on their core business. No more side-projects with questionable profitability. In the last 2 years since Pat Gelsinger…

Sad news. NUCs could have been an excellent platform if they had tried to work a bit more on cooling. On third-party cases, NUCs were great. But on stock cases, some models were too noisy. Still, they provided great value. Nonetheless, I agree it's better for Intel to focus on their core business and leave this market to others. Some niche PC makers such as Cirrus7 offer great NUC-like systems.

Apple worked hard to make cooling work in the Mac Mini, and now the M series of CPUs.

Intel just slapped a chip in a generic case.

Re: Intel exiting the PC business as it stops investment in the Intel NUC

#173

Post by gowld »

toast0 wrote: post #106
DesiLurker wrote: post #44

I call BS on them being not good market fit, Apple does totally fine with mac mini. also these are just laptops w/o screen and battery. IMO the real reason may be worries around minipcs finally getting good enough that they may cannibalize higher margin PC market. BTW there are other vendors like Beelink that make semi decent tiny computers and I have one of those as my teenage kids pc,works just fine.

Do we need Intel to release these, or can they just sell the chips to integrators like they do with other desktops and laptops?

Intel did it because, for 10 years now, integrators refused to.

Re: Intel exiting the PC business as it stops investment in the Intel NUC

#174

Post by rcme »

Aromasin wrote: post #140

Funny enough, I predicted this in a previous HZ comment 3 months ago when they cut their server systems business. > "My guess is that they're cutting the portfolio down to feature only chipsets and add-in cards. Just CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, ASICs, networking. It makes sense if anything - it really focuses on their core business. No more side-projects with questionable profitability. In the last 2 years since Pat Gelsinger…

Isn’t this basically the innovator’s dilemma? You can call it focusing the core business, but you can also call it dropping investment in long term cash flows.

Re: Intel exiting the PC business as it stops investment in the Intel NUC

#175

Post by cududa »

wtallis wrote: post #79
adrian_b wrote: post #10

This is sad, because the Intel NUCs were some of the last computers with adequate technical documentation. For most modern computers you cannot be 100% sure about what you get for your money, until you have them in your hands and you can run tests yourself. By then, if you discover that the computer is not exactly what you want, it is too late. You cannot get your money back because the computer is not defective, it…

I had the same feeling of disappointment when Intel exited the consumer motherboard business. I bought one of their Ivy Bridge generation motherboards for my PC build at the time because it was the only one that I could confirm had the features I wanted. The motherboard manual listed details like the part numbers for the SuperIO, Firewire and audio chips, the location of the temperature sensors on the board, the curr…

Man do I miss the days of DFI motherboards when their engineers would pop into the overclocking community and share code snippets of relevant BIOS firmware. The things were so well documented there were something like 3 or 4 third-party BIOS distributions.

Then there was their community and RMA manager Dona. That woman had to be one of the hardest working people I've ever encountered. She must have slept like 5 hours a day. People could post on some obscure forum about a defect and she'd find the post and make it right. One time, when I was around 16 in 2007, I broke a very niche and specific overclocking record on DDR2 latency that still passed Memtest x86, and Dona hooked me the hell up. Suddenly started getting all sorts of companies sending me heatsinks, RAM, PSU's, etc to "review" if I wanted to. Sidenote to this tangent - I have to say, the ultra-fine grit sandpaper kit with 12 sheets in increasing grit, was absolutely my favorite. Learned how to sand a heatsink down to a near mirror finish and shaved a few degrees celsius off my de-capped AMD Opteron 165.

DFI BIOS were famous for exposing the most settings for regulating RAM/ CPU/ Chipset/ GPU/ SATA/ PCI-E/ IDE communication and lanes. This guide/ participating in the DFI overclocking community probably taught me more about the fundamentals of computer science, and how all those electrons move around to make the sand think. https://forums.overclockersclub.com/topic/100835-the-definit...

Fun trip down memory lane.

Re: Intel exiting the PC business as it stops investment in the Intel NUC

#176

Post by imtringued »

simmons wrote: post #117

Oh, I'm sorry to hear this. :( I've bought many NUCs over the years. I'm literally sitting in my office right now with 8 NUCs set up -- 1 as a workstation, and 7 as servers performing various tasks. I know people have always complained that they are a bit more expensive than the alternatives, but I'm willing to pay a premium for the excellent Linux compatibility and reliability. That said, I've been expecting this fo…

>but I'm willing to pay a premium for the excellent Linux compatibility and reliability.

Yeah it is quite strange. Even the Vision Five 2 RISC-V has better software support than your usual ARM SBC. The big caveat is that the opensource drivers only support Vulkan but Imagination ™ has planned on releasing a Vulkan based OpenGL implementation. Of course application software support is worse than ARM because of recompilation but that is a trivial barrier. If the hardware is any good, distros and developers will compile their packages for the new ISA.

Re: Intel exiting the PC business as it stops investment in the Intel NUC

#177

Post by tiffanyh »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #134
tiffanyh wrote: post #133

Cloud Compute. Seems like a huge lost opportunity for by Intel not targeting the "consumer" cloud compute market with NUC's, because they wanted to protect their high margin server chip business. There's huge classes of workloads that a NUC would do just fine on for the cloud, and cloud operators would love the lower power & physical size of these NUC compute devices. AMD has embraced it, and you'll see 7000 chips at…

For that kind of use case, you'd want a blade server or similar, not a NUC. In particular, you'd want something that works with a rack.

Something like this?

https://hackaday.com/2012/12/09/160-mac-minis-one-rack/

160 Mac Mini’s in a rack.

That’s ~4-nodes / 1U. And you don’t have the added expense of the blade enclosure.

Re: Intel exiting the PC business as it stops investment in the Intel NUC

#178

Post by gwd »

akira2501 wrote: post #147
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> BTW there are other vendors like Beelink that make semi decent tiny computers and I have one of those as my teenage kids pc,works just fine. The issue is, Intel's aiming more upmarket (based on their pricing) for something that doesn't offer a lot more. Intel's done interesting/fun things, such as building the entire motherboard into a single slot sized unit, but going out and buying a Beelink is a better propositi…

> If anything, I think Intel can exit this market because they succeeded. They lead the creation of a market but failed to maintain any competitive edge in it. That's a story of initial success that ultimately ran through their fingers, like so many other examples you've presented. Calling this fully "a success" seems very generous. > If anything, I think Intel can exit this market because they succeeded. You could s…

> They lead the creation of a market but failed to maintain any competitive edge in it. That's a story of initial success that ultimately ran through their fingers, like so many other examples you've presented. Calling this fully "a success" seems very generous.

The thing you're missing is that they sell the chips inside the product. I think the idea is that it goes like this:

Intel: Hey everyone, we made this chip we think could be really cool in a new form factor.

OEMs: Uum, I dunno -- if that's such a cool thing, why isn't anyone else making them?

Intel: OK, I'll just make one myself.

OEMs: Oh hey, people do seem to really like those NUCs.

Intel: There we go, you get the idea!

I don't know this is what happened, but at least it's a plausible definition of "success".

Re: Intel exiting the PC business as it stops investment in the Intel NUC

#179

Post by kfinley »

Aromasin wrote: post #140

Funny enough, I predicted this in a previous HZ comment 3 months ago when they cut their server systems business. > "My guess is that they're cutting the portfolio down to feature only chipsets and add-in cards. Just CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, ASICs, networking. It makes sense if anything - it really focuses on their core business. No more side-projects with questionable profitability. In the last 2 years since Pat Gelsinger…

> If any hedge funds are looking for analysts, I'm always open to offers...

How would you invest based on this prediction?

Re: Intel exiting the PC business as it stops investment in the Intel NUC

#180

Post by glimshe »

tracker1 wrote: post #156
DesiLurker wrote: post #44

I call BS on them being not good market fit, Apple does totally fine with mac mini. also these are just laptops w/o screen and battery. IMO the real reason may be worries around minipcs finally getting good enough that they may cannibalize higher margin PC market. BTW there are other vendors like Beelink that make semi decent tiny computers and I have one of those as my teenage kids pc,works just fine.

I don't think it's the form factor, I think it's more about competing with their own customers. There are similar offerings (including AMD based) from several other vendors. I've been far more interested in the AMD based ones the past few gen... currently using a MiniForum model with a 5900HX for home server duties.

There are some great Chinese mini PCs on Amazon, many of them using Intel processors. Some of these are very compelling against ARM mini PCs such as the Raspberry Pi 400.
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