Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

servethehome.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 526 posts

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

#221

Post by anonylizard »

javier2 wrote: post #205
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…

I think its a bigger issue that the next gen NUCs will be good enough to cannibalize the rest of the desktop market. Look at the recent amd offerings and the mac mini with M1. They can replace my destop fully. The only reason I have a desktop now is for gaming.

That's not happening.

The new high end application for PCs is running AIs locally.

No way you can fit a 4090 in a NUC, the GPU itself is larger than a NUC, heat dissipation requirements cannot be 'optimized' away.

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

#222

Post by scarface_74 »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #210
scarface_74 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NUC was never going to be a mass market product. Sure Apple sells the Mac Mini. But the entire Mac line is only 10% of Apple’s revenue and most of that is laptops. But Apple has to support its ecosystem as its only supplier. Intel doesn’t And besides, a NUC based on x86 chips is by definition going to suck at either performance or heat.

> Sure Apple sells the Mac Mini. But the entire Mac line is only 10% of Apple’s revenue and most of that is laptops The 10% figure is spot-on and that really threw me - I was expecting something like 25-30%: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/FY22_Q4_Consolidated_Fin... It’s unnerving that Apple is effectively dependent on a single product line to subsidise everything: Apple Silicon must have cost tens (hundreds?) o…

> It’s unnerving that Apple is effectively dependent on a single product line to subsidise everything

From 1977 - 1988 Apple was totally dependent on the Apple //e (the Mac was losing money)

From 1992-2003 Apple was totally dependent on the Mac (the iPod was just a meaningful contributor to revenue when iTunes came to Windows.)

When Apple depended on the Mac for revenue, they consistently failed to keep up with Intel - first with the 68K and then with the Mac.

If the iPhone fails, the Mac no matter what would never keep up.

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

#224

Post by alliao »

pipo234 wrote: post #20

We bought a couple of i7 NUCs every time a new generation was launched, mainly to have access to the latest GPU features. That is, we hoped to use Intel's MFX Media SDK for transcoding h264 (or even h265) video. Unfortunately both the SDK and the hardware were too much of a moving target, going from software to hardware only, Windows only then later linux only on CentOS, then only on Ubuntu, then (partially) open sou…

how does it compare with Apple silicones? M1/M2 the mac mini seem like a no brainer at those prices for transcoding?

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

#225

Post by doublepg23 »

vbitz wrote: post #198
stemlord wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say there's a huge performance gap between the most powerful Pi and even a Nuc mini from 6 years ago. Hard to consider them in the same ballpark, use-case-wise.

I’ve done Coremark scores across a range of different systems including NUCs and Pi’s. A Pi 4 gets a single thread score of about 10k and a new entry level NUC gets about 20k. If you look at older systems a Beelink T4 Pro Mini (using a much older CPU) gets about 11k well within the same ballpark as a Pi4. Comparing that to a similar aged Pi a Pi3B gets about 4k score. For comparison a high end AMD Ryzen gets about 45…

Even my 2017 NUC had NVMe, I’d say that gives it a leg up.

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

#226

Post by spin »

giantrobot wrote: post #218
windexh8er wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NUC, depending on the model, had decent cooling. I've owned a few of them over the years. My Skull Canyon having been my longest desktop computer ever and always had great Linux support. Funny enough the fan on that unit was recalled and Intel happily replaced it well out of warranty. But with the advent of Minisforum, Beelink and all the other random options on AliExpress I would gather it's been getting harder and…

> But with the advent of Minisforum, Beelink and all the other random options on AliExpress I would gather it's been getting harder and harder to command a premium price because it says Intel on the box. It was my impression the NUC sold by Intel was always meant to be a proof of concept for the NUC-class device to inspire third parties to make them. Intel getting out of the market now that it's proven sort of makes…

Yeah, I thought that was Intel's MO. Intel quit making RealSense only after a competitor (OAK-D from Luxonis) became viable. They just want to make chips. It's my impression that they only build "lower" devices as a proof-of-concept for how their chips can be used.

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

#227

Post by berkle4455 »

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...

$INTC has done a whole lot of nothing for the past 9 months, I don’t think any hedge funds care short or long.

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

#228

Post by heresie-dabord »

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.

Recent Beelink models also offer dual Ethernet.

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

#229

Post by fomine3 »

SilverBirch wrote: post #130

The NUC was a great idea delivered by a company that was totally opposed to it by design. You had big fat inefficient Intel cores crammed into low TDP applications and to make matters worse they wanted massive margins. Could’ve been a fantastic product delivered by ARM or some smartphone manufacturer.

Not so much inefficient unless you run it at high clock all time.

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

#230

Post by brewdad »

javier2 wrote: post #205
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…

I think its a bigger issue that the next gen NUCs will be good enough to cannibalize the rest of the desktop market. Look at the recent amd offerings and the mac mini with M1. They can replace my destop fully. The only reason I have a desktop now is for gaming.

For home users, gaming is the only reason to own a traditional desktop. Non-gamers are better served by laptops or NUC style machines.

The business market is still figuring out the balance between lightweight machines using the cloud and beefy desktops running locally.

Post reply on HN