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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

#261

Post by tcmart14 »

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…

The one major flaw I would like to point out here. Don't look at development on apple silicon as only development on Apple silicon. They base the architecture off their A-series processors in their phones, but scaled up. So all the research money for Apple Silicon is also research money for their in house A-series processors for their phones.

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

#262

Post by freeAgent »

bamfly wrote: post #90
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.

The NUCs had a pretty wide range of processor options, and often fairly-old ones with low core counts from lower-end processor lines were still for sale—but never at what felt like the correct price to me, especially since they usually needed memory and a disk (the ones that came with those seemed like an even worse deal)

Even the low-end NUCs are much faster than the fastest Pi.

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

#263

Post by skirmish »

bamfly wrote: post #53
electrosphere wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wanted one for this purpose to replace a Dell Optiplex SFF running Kodi. It's dual-core CPU and cannot decode x265 efficiently. The NUCs are a bit too expensive though and plenty of x264 content still available.

YMMV but I've found my watching:fiddling-with-the-system ratio to be way higher with Jellyfin than it ever was in my years and years of trying and failing to enjoy Kodi/XBMC. And it's way more usable for other members of my family, who tended to look at Kodi and (understandably) just go "nope, not touching that". If they actually tried they'd usually need me to rescue them from some weird, useless mode they'd gotten…

For running Kodi, this player worked very well for me for years now:

https://osmc.tv/vero/

They have hardware x264 and x265 decoding, support is great too.

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

#264

Post by [deleted] »

scarface_74 wrote: post #186
rcme wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

[deleted]

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

#265

Post by freeAgent »

kylecazar wrote: post #125

One of those products I've always been on the verge of buying but never pulled the trigger. I'm now looking at the System 76 Meerkat to fill the same void.

I’m pretty sure those are rebranded NUCs, so don’t wait too long.

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

#266

Post by sbierwagen »

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.

>cooling

I bought the Intel Euclid (basically a Realsense with integrated compute) and out of the box it had a fan curve that would cause it to thermal throttle within 5 minutes, which would also cause the wifi to drop out.

On a regular consumer device you pick a tradeoff that will make it quieter, but really the only thing anyone used the Euclid for was robotics, where if you're using the CPU at all it's to run SLAM or object recognition nets, in which case you need 100% of the performance 100% of the time...

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

#267

Post by jeffbee »

tomComb wrote: post #242
tracker1 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AMD models from MinisForum, BeeLink etc have been pretty competitively priced.

But you’ll probably never get a BIOS update.

This is the main problem. I buy NUCs because I know I am going to get a machine that works and if there's anything wrong with the BIOS they will ship an update, and that update will be installable without Microsoft Windows. If I am left to a marketplace without Intel's excellent BIOS, I am going to be very sad.

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

#268

Post by jeffbee »

dtx1 wrote: post #37

These Werke never a good market fit. They couldnt compete with normal medium Form factor builds on price, couldnt compete with chinese small nuc like computers in the low end (ironically using Intel chips) and raspberry pis for the SOC Space. They ended up being bad competitions for high end gaming PCs giving you notebook like power for desktop gaming prices. I'm surprised they survived this long.

> never a good market fit ... couldnt compete

They sold over 10 million of these things.

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

#269

Post by gloryjulio »

etempleton wrote: post #196
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…

I always saw the NUCs as proof of concept for small form factor PCs and to that end I think they have succeeded. There are a ton of different form factors now.

The probably is that the amd apu is just better and more balanced now. You get lower tdp + better graphic cards. So ppl would just buy the amd counter part
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