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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

#271

Post by zalyh »

LegitShady wrote: post #126
DesiLurker wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBH I dont own a mini but I have used it and it seems fine. online reviews are also decent if you go above baseline 8Gb. but thats targeted towards mac users which are already in higher price bracket so not too bad. plus its better if power consumption and noise level. overall I feel that there is enough integration density in processors that the laptop form factors will be good enough for most common (& semi advance…

Intel nucs are fine too. The question isn’t if they’re fine, the question is if they make good business sense. Also, apple’s crazy profitability means they may offer something like the mini that doesn’t sell as well as their laptop, while intel is ruthlessly cutting out things that aren’t part of their core business because of their monetary issues. If Intel can’t compete with cheaper manufacturers and its not hittin…

As much as I love using MacOS, the Intel NUCs offer upgradability for SSD and RAM which makes it harder to go with the Mac Mini if you need larger storage or memory.

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

#273

Post by hodgesrm »

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…

> It's sad to NUCs go, but it was inevitable.

Nooooo! This is a tragedy. I love my NUC. It's totally handy to have a little computer on my desk to load up with whatever Linux distro I please and play around. NUC is way better than Raspberry PI.

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

#274

Post by wtallis »

nonethewiser wrote: post #202
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…

> 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 is just different from what you expected. Can you give an example? Clearly you are concerned with more th…

For most laptops (some gaming machines excepted) you don't find out the CPU and GPU power limits until after you install third-party software to inspect those settings. The turbo power limits affect system performance far more than minor clock speed differences between different Intel SKUs with similar core counts; it's not uncommon to find that the difference between an i5 and an i7 matters less than the unspecified thermal and power delivery limits.

The spec sheets that are provided for pre-built consumer machines will at best identify the two or three most expensive chips and give you a vague idea of what class of part they selected for up to a dozen other components. You will definitely never get the specificity of a PCPartPicker parts list. You won't be able to audit the list of components for ones that are known to be problematic for Linux use.

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

#275

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

tcmart14 wrote: post #261
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yes, that’s my very point.

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

#276

Post by pabs3 »

imtringued wrote: post #176
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 recompi…

I don't think the VF2 Linux kernel patches are in mainline yet? Many ARM SBCs are in mainline.

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

#277

Post by newaccount74 »

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…

I know a few people who bought an iMac because it was the easiest way to get a desktop PC at home:

- big screen

- simple setup

- lasts 10 years

They're a fantastic value if you want a trouble free PC for non-tech folks. The only sad thing is that after 10 years you are basically throwing away a perfectly fine display.

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

#278

Post by mvandermeulen »

cududa wrote: post #175
wtallis wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I’m guessing we are of similar age. I also had similar experiences and remember Dona. Looking back the DFI boards were ridiculously good as an overclocker there wasn’t anything you couldn’t learn about and tweak. I feel like that was the golden age of performance consumer hardware.

Fond memories of that time period, hanging out on BlazingPC and other forums. Back then my primary setup was cooled with a Vapor phase change machine if I remember right. Hummed along at about -60 Celsius under load and was super stable even at close to 5ghz I think it was. I also had a bunch of Kayl GPU & CPU pots which meant I was always chomping at the bit to do dry ice / ln2 sessions and crank out a few digits of pi. Now I have an M1 Max, how boring.

Thanks for reminding me cududa. Sounds like we may have competed for a few records back in the day

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

#279

Post by newaccount74 »

rsynnott wrote: post #59
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.

> Apple does totally fine with mac mini. Is there data on how well they actually sell? I always vaguely assumed it was a pretty low-volume product that they couldn't actually get rid of due to niche customer applications. They've historically often been very slow to _update_ it; they definitely don't treat it as one of their more important products.

M1 and M2 mini were updated before the Studio/Mac pro, so at least the last two generations weren't slow to update.

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

#280

Post by akira2501 »

gwd wrote: post #178
akira2501 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 w…

> The thing you're missing is that they sell the chips inside the product.

It's a mobile chipset. They're already making those. Other manufacturers also make those. A good hint here is these devices use bog standard 19V laptop power supplies.

The NUC form factor more or less already existed in the fanless industrial mini PC and HTPC markets. Intel just made it a high performance consumer product, but they also could have moved in on that industrial space and offered a solid product with good support into a space where only the Raspberry Pi and some very small scale and niche distributors exist.

They really need a products division that is outside of their core chip division. The management styles don't translate, and again, all this does is risk damaging that brand to claim a phyrric victory over a flash in the pan.

Plus.. I hate cheap plastic PCs from builders that offer zero support or longevity in their products. Intel would have had me buying fanless NUCs for years if they stayed in the space. The price difference was _well worth it_ for me.

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