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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

#511

Post by elkos »

adrian_b wrote: post #295
elkos wrote: post #281

I was looking for an Intel NUC 13 i5 since I have a very limited workspace at home and to my understanding Intel has a very decent quality offering and Linux support. Which alternatives would people suggest?

For now, you can still buy a $500 NUC13ANKi5 (slim, only M.2 SSDs) or NUC13ANHi5 (tall, also a 2.5" SSD/HDD) without worries. What Intel said is that they will not launch any new models, so the future NUC with a Meteor Lake CPU must have been canceled, or perhaps sold to a partner like ASRock. The best alternatives are from ASUS, Beelink and Minisforum. Alternatives with lower performance, but perhaps also lower pric…

Well to be honest my major concern on the ASUS, Beelink, Minisforum alternatives esp with the 7735HS is Linux compatibility and thermal management. If my setup can play well with Debian or Arch I'm sold.

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

#512

Post by anthk »

squokko wrote: post #508
anthk wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OFC it's the second one over Android smartphones. Which is the alternative? Still, in Spain, France, Italy, Germany... the iPhone it's seen for poshy people and Android covers the 90% of the needs of the average guy at a much cheaper price.

Almost any app that's available on both iOS and Android will do more than 50% of its revenues from iOS even in markets that are 75% Android. Those "poshy" people are quick to click on in-app purchases.

Not always, as most iPhone users here are CEOs and mid-range managers. They love cutting costs down.

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

#513

Post by adrian_b »

elkos wrote: post #511
adrian_b wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For now, you can still buy a $500 NUC13ANKi5 (slim, only M.2 SSDs) or NUC13ANHi5 (tall, also a 2.5" SSD/HDD) without worries. What Intel said is that they will not launch any new models, so the future NUC with a Meteor Lake CPU must have been canceled, or perhaps sold to a partner like ASRock. The best alternatives are from ASUS, Beelink and Minisforum. Alternatives with lower performance, but perhaps also lower pric…

Well to be honest my major concern on the ASUS, Beelink, Minisforum alternatives esp with the 7735HS is Linux compatibility and thermal management. If my setup can play well with Debian or Arch I'm sold.

There are frequently reviews about thermal management and Linux compatibility of such small computers at sites like:

https://www.servethehome.com/

https://www.phoronix.com/

The thermal management seems to have been significantly improved in many models of this year in comparison with the models from previous years, but you cannot make guesses about it without seeing a credible review.

I have not heard of any problems in Linux with the recent AMD models. While AMD still does not provide a comparable software support to Intel, at least recently the delays in providing kernel and drivers updates for their new products seem to have been reduced.

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

#514

Post by paulmd »

paulmd wrote: post #504
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…

> They made products for customers, while simultaneously competing with said customers. It's hard to build any decent partnerships on that premise. I once talked to an AMD engineer and asked why they didn't just build a barebones NAS chassis with some of their ryzen embedded stuff since Ryzen is quite popular but there's very few Ryzen products in that segment. Obviously QNAP and Synology have some decent demand. Tha…

also to be clear, management engine is far far worse. the chipset boots the chip for Intel, Ryzen is a SOC always. For intel, it's super intimately involved with the processor bringup in ways that can't be exposed to third parties anymore. They literally can't open anything while the ME is on the chipset, but they're flailing at homeostasis let alone big rearchs of their processor's brainstem against the possibility of third-party control of the bringup.

The chipset is a pure IO expander for AMD. AMD still is doing way better at that, it's just things like X300 ("the chipset is no chipset") being restricted to industrial/embedded, or board partners not being allowed to pursue things they want that break AMD's segmentation. PCIe 4 enablement (including opt-in) on select X370/X470 boards was something partners wanted for example. And there was no technical reason for X399/TRX40 to be segmented and even WRX80 could have been shoehorned on with "everything works just not optimally" level compatibility backwards and forwards. Partners could have done that if it wasn't denied/locked out. They did it on the Socket SP3 flavor.

Partners should ideally just get the freedom to play, and if they can make something work, cool. Let's have more Asrock/Asrock Rack and ICY DOCK design shenanigans again. Clamshell VRAM cards should be sold relatively close to actual cost rather than being gated by both AMD and NVIDIA. Etc. Partners should have the ability to configure the product in any way the product could reasonably be engineered to work. If features are being explicitly segmented by product tier it should be enforced by e-fuse feature-fusing at launch and that's the deal, no taking AVX-512 out after it launched.

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

#515

Post by alwillis »

dangus wrote: post #333
Turskarama wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe they should though. A lot of people buy a laptop just to only ever use it on their desk and never actually take it anywhere. A desktop computer with equivalent performance will generally be several hundred dollars cheaper and run quieter as well.

Have you actually looked at the price of pre-built desktops lately? Check out all the big computer manufacturers like Dell and HP. Go to their “cheap desktops” section (e.g., Dell Inspiron). Focusing on Dell, the cheapest one I see is $499 and the specs are a 13th gen i5, Intel UHD 730, 8GB of RAM, 512GB SSD. Bring your own monitor! For laptops, the Inspiron 15 for $430 gets you 12GB RAM, 512GB SSD, 11th gen core i5,…

> Look at Apple and the Mac mini will save you $400 over a MacBook Air but you’ll need a keyboard, mouse, monitor, and webcam/microphone.

Yes, that's who the Mac mini is primarily targeted at--PC users that want a Mac but don't want to spend a lot of money and who have a keyboard, mouse and display.

> In the case of Apple, the desktop is literally louder because the only Apple system with a fanless design is the MacBook Air…

It takes a lot to actually get any Apple Silicon Mac with a fan to make enough sound to actually be heard. If you read the reviews for the Mac mini, nobody has ever said fan noise was an issue because they never heard any.

> and you get a minimal performance advantage for having a desktop because all Apple’s chips are based on the processor inside your iPhone.

Also not accurate.

Because desktops have more room, you can get more cores (both CPU and GPU) and run them faster (and therefore hotter) than you can in a laptop. The fact the M-series chips came from the iPhone's A-series has nothing to do with performance. A $499 M2 Mac mini has 4 performance CPU cores and 8 GPU cores while a $1,199 iPhone 14 Pro Max has 2 performance CPU cores and 5 GPU cores. That's the beauty of ARM: it scales from phones to laptops to servers.

If you need more storage, you can get 8 TB in a Mac mini, while the MacBook Air maxes out at 2 TB.

The Mac mini has always been the workhorse of the Mac line and hasn't changed. Just going from Intel to ARM made the Mac mini a no-brainer replacement for the old Intel Mac Pros, which were the poster children for loud desktop computers.

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

#516

Post by pabs3 »

snvzz wrote: post #329
pabs3 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not all patches are there, but an impressive amount[0] already is, despite how young this platform is. 0. https://rvspace.org/en/project/JH7110_Upstream_Plan

Ah, good to hear.

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

#517

Post by Aromasin »

touisteur wrote: post #183
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…

A bit off mark on networking, looking at Tofino there. Could have maybe left barefoot alone, but no, buy it, hype it, actually tape out and start delivering nextgen, then cancel before people rack them.

I was thinking more so their Ethernet and Wireless product portfolio than the Tofino line: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/overview.ht...

With regards to Tofino, I think they've looked at the portfolio and realized they can fill that niche with their FPGA products. Looks like they've stripped out all the useful IP from Barefoot and repackaged it to be used on a Stratix/Agilex chips, or as tiles on their other devices.

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

#520

Post by touisteur »

Aromasin wrote: post #517
touisteur wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit off mark on networking, looking at Tofino there. Could have maybe left barefoot alone, but no, buy it, hype it, actually tape out and start delivering nextgen, then cancel before people rack them.

I was thinking more so their Ethernet and Wireless product portfolio than the Tofino line: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/overview.ht... With regards to Tofino, I think they've looked at the portfolio and realized they can fill that niche with their FPGA products. Looks like they've stripped out all the useful IP from Barefoot and repackaged it to be used on a Stratix/Agilex chips, or as tiles on th…

I didn't want to be a pain, but I'm still waiting on a 200G (QSFP56) 400G (QSFP-DD or QSFP112) Ethernet NIC and some kind of user-programmable (and no FPGA isn't a panacea here for many reasons) packet pipelining. Connect-X (from 5 onward) is king there and of course it's all closed. You also get Broadcom stuff there. But no Intel.

Oh you can build crazy 800G (or up to 1200G) stuff (that don't fit PCIe bandwidth) but the entry price is quite steep, see https://www.reflexces.com/pcie-boards/intel-stratix-10-fpga/...

The real interesting part of the Tofino line was the advent of P4, for smart network switch and eventually some processing in network, scatter-gather support or all-reduce. Some competition for nvswitches but on standard Ethernet for example.

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