5 ms·

I find that Intel makes quite a few great products and initiatives. They just don't market it as loudly as others. The Intel NUC (http://www.intel.com/content/w

by _nedR 12y ago

I find that Intel makes quite a few great products and initiatives. They just don't market it as loudly as others. The Intel NUC (http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/nuc/overview.html http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/nuc/overview.html) is quite a versatile machine - smaller, better performance and value for money than mac minis, and more hacker friendly. It even has a cute unboxing experience (The box plays the intel jingle when you open it) Then there are initiatives like the Intel Realsense cam (like Kinect), Edison, Moblin( which morphed into Meego and later Sailfish). Intel often doesn't get the credit it deserves - Contributing to open source and open standards, having intervened in the markets when someone (usually Apple or Microsoft) got too dominant or comfortable(That was what Meego, Ultrabooks, NUC was about). They certainly make the market more interesting. I guess this one is aimed at Android TV, and meant to level the field for Microsoft and Linux-based systems.

Sven7 12y ago
That is because their target customer has never been the end user. How many people with a smart phone have heard of Qualcomm?
- _nedR 12y ago
  Well. Intel has always pitched themselves to the end-customer. The 'Intel Inside', Ultrabook, etc., campaigns have all been so that the customer insists on an Intel device.
  - greenpresident 12y ago
    This kind of branding is called ingredient branding. They try to remain visible as the supplier of a component. Intel is the textbook example. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingredient_branding http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingredient_branding
  - vidarh 12y ago
    But that's not to sell to the end user, but to make the ability to put those Intel Inside etc. stickers on your product a valuable feature for OEMs when considering whether to buy from Intel or a competitor.
boyaka 12y ago
I got my Dad a NUC for Christmas...He hasn't really been using it yet. I think this might have been a more interesting and simple gift, wish it came out in time. I did get to play with the NUC because I wanted to have it all configured and ready to use. It was interesting to see how they got all of the components packed in and I was impressed by the performance. Main issue I had was graphics support, because I wanted to put Elementary OS on it to see if he'd be interested in trying out Linux. Ended up going with the latest Ubuntu instead (Elementary OS Luna is built on Ubuntu 12.04) which worked fine. My Dad had gone through a couple of those Shuttle "Mini" computers (the motherboards were Flex-ATX, slightly bigger than Mini-ITX and obviously needed to be smaller than micro-ATX), so I thought the NUC (between Nano-ITX and Pico-ITX [1]) might appeal to him. They both died and he's currently using a standard desktop. I believe one or both of his Shuttle's died due to a PSU failure, so it's nice to have the external power brick on the NUC. He and my Mom had previously been using a Windows Media Center desktop with a tuner card and Comcast cable, but they're using DirecTV boxes on all the TVs now so not much need for a HTPC. He said he was thinking about trying to use the NUC with Windows 8 and a touch screen somehow...Not really sure how he can accomplish that. Besides introducing him to Linux, I was thinking he could use it on his TV as just an alternate computer and wanted to show him how to use Synergy to control it with his desktop keyboard/mouse. He's currently switching his TV between the DirecTV box and his desktop as a second display. At the very least it's a backup, and he could potentially take it on trips as a more powerful alternative to a laptop. There's just so many different options for computing these days. It's like information overload, but with hardware. [1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/5800/slimming-desktops-down-intel-reveals-next-unit-of-computing http://www.anandtech.com/show/5800/slimming-desktops-down-in... (existence of Nano-ITX and Pico-ITX pointed out in the comments)
- toyg 12y ago
  > There's just so many different options for computing these days. It's like information overload, but with hardware. Yeah. I have two Dreamplugs lying there unused at the moment, plus a CuBox used as NAS/TimeMachine, and a MicroPython waiting for some free time... so many options, so little time. They are also getting so powerful, I'm seriously considering a few "enterprise" scenarios. Remember when IT meant mainframes, so individual departments would just bypass them and buy their own PCs? I think we're ready for a new wave of that decentralized approach: between mobile and these little bad boys, there's plenty of power around to run a number of applications that would have required a rack server 5 or 10 years ago. Now John Accountant could just buy a little silent box and put it on his desk, without having to go through hellish rounds of IT approvals.
simi_ 12y ago
> It even has a cute unboxing experience (The box plays the intel jingle when you open it) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjdyudYdIPc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjdyudYdIPc That's very cute, however if it's the box that actually plays the sound isn't it terribly wasteful, ecologically?
- riffraff 12y ago
  there are birthday card that do the same, it's very little extra stuff compared to the computer itself, I imagine.
  - simi_ 12y ago
    Good point. However to me it still just seems terribly wasteful/stupid. Considering the aux battery in most computing devices, couldn't the musical thingie be embedded into the computer itself?
    - asuidyasiud 12y ago
      It is completely irrelevant, ecologically speaking.
      - dingaling 12y ago
        > It is completely irrelevant, ecologically speaking. How so? It makes the box unrecyclable; worse still, as soon as such an item is detected in the recycling plant it will often cause the whole batch of material to be rejected and dumped[1]. No-one has time to pick-through cardboard removing batteries and circuitry. [1] Source: anecdote from a colleague who worked in a 'recyclarium'. Contaminated material causes the line to be stopped, batch dumped and machines cleaned. The actual pre-processing sorting is quite fascinating, using spectrometers to detect the type of materials.
        vidarh 12y ago
        From one of the comments above: "It's not the box, but a small plastic enclosure" And while I sympathise, consider that this is part of packaging for a computer, where the manufacture of the computer itself will consume many times as many resources, and the power to use the computer over its lifetime will consume many times as many resources. With respect to the overall environmental impact of the purchase of that device, the inclusion of a device like that will be a rounding error.
samcrawford 12y ago
It's not just the NUC; don't forget the Minnowboard Max, which is also Intel-sponsored at least. It has slightly lower specs than this stick, but it's still far more powerful than the R-Pi and great for home automation work. I've got a couple here and I have no real complaints.
yati 12y ago
This. e.g., not many people know that Intel created OpenCV and open sourced it.
greggman 12y ago
I was forced to use NUCs for a project. They were under powered for me. All I needed to do was draw 5 fullscreen quads at 1920x1080 but all they could handle was 4 fullscreen quads at 1280x720. I'm sure they're great for some things so YMMV
- walterbell 12y ago
  Was that an Ivy Bridge or Haswell GPU?
- wilhil 12y ago
  To be fair, that is a big requirement... Loads of mid to high end graphics cards from just a few years backfail at dual QHD screen. I power 2x 1920x1080 screens off of a NUC and am very happy.
  - kllrnohj 12y ago
    No, it isn't. 1920 * 1080 pixels * 5 * 60 = 622MPixel/s of fillrate required. Radeon 9700 Pro, high end from over 10 years ago, had a fillrate of 2600MPixels/s Let's take a high end graphics card from a few years back, say... GTX 480? A 2010 card? That has a fillrate of 33,600 MPixels/sec. 5x 1920x1080 quads is child's play for any reasonable desktop GPU part. In fact high end cards from 2009 could game at 5760x2160 (that's 6x 1920x1080 displays) off of a single card.
donavanm 12y ago
Most of those examples were tech demonstrators and reference designs, AFAIK. A small number of units, if any, were available. I don't recall many partners bringing them to market. Intel's not in the business of selling a couple thousand of these units, they're looking for OEMs to pick it up and sell millions. Or at least shape/gauge the future market.
- _nedR 12y ago
  Exactly. Intel seems to be mainly interested in selling more processors and motherboards to OEMs than anything else. Intel seems to intervene on occasion to shake things up or show OEMs how its done. For eg., the Ultrabook was to help laptop manufacturers who were getting clobbered by Apple. NUC was so that OEMs would build competitors (like the Gigabyte BRIX Pro) to the Mac Mini and so on.
sorokod 12y ago
Looks like they just got a version bump http://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-nuc-broadwell,28344.html http://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-nuc-broadwell,28344.h...
- minot 12y ago
  I hope they make one with a full size HDMI (maybe even HDMI 2?) next year.
macco 12y ago
Do they also have a laptop variant? Their Hardware is actually quite awesome - especially for Linux users
Alupis 12y ago
When I was in the market for a small low-power home server, I actually found the NUC's to be overpriced and under-performing. There's no i7 option, and they will run you about the same base price as an Gigabyte Brix which does offer i7 and/or i5's with more powerful graphics (and AMD APU options for very nice graphics if required). My home server did not require much graphics of course, but the i7 quad core is very much so a nice-to-have. Even a Zotac Zbox with an i5 will get you more bang-for-the-buck since they are about $50-$100 cheaper, and come with more peripherals (like dual Gigabit ethernet ports).
- walterbell 12y ago
  NUCs are the modern incarnation of Intel whitebox reference motherboards. If they were too cheap or tailored to specific use cases, OEMs would be out of business.
- kbenson 12y ago
  I don't think Intel necessarily wants to dominate or even lead the market with these offerings, they want to spur the market to fill the niche now that they've shown the demand and the ability(and the parts for sale). Intel didn't want to sell ultrabooks itself, but it very much wanted a vibrant marketplace so it could sell more high-end parts, and keep Apple from leveraging their market position for better pricing from Intel.
  - tacotime 12y ago
    I agree. I think they want to more or less be the apple of more open hardware. They aren't planning to make money off NUC, they're planning to make money off their chips. This is ultimately a strategy for getting more people to want more of their chip. Right now all the slickest devices are arm powered... so many shiny glassy sleek looking cell phones and tables and hardly an x86 in sight... They're not selling $/performance here, that's just a barrior to entry, they're selling a vision and a brand... intel inside
- Someone 12y ago
  http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/nuc/products-overview.html http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/nuc/products-overview... has i7 "coming Q2 2015. Prodict details coming soon" Number of cores? That page doesn't say.

by _nedR 12y ago

Sven7 12y ago

That is because their target customer has never been the end user. How many people with a smart phone have heard of Qualcomm?

_nedR 12y ago
Well. Intel has always pitched themselves to the end-customer. The 'Intel Inside', Ultrabook, etc., campaigns have all been so that the customer insists on an Intel device.
- greenpresident 12y ago
  This kind of branding is called ingredient branding. They try to remain visible as the supplier of a component. Intel is the textbook example. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingredient_branding http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingredient_branding
- vidarh 12y ago
  But that's not to sell to the end user, but to make the ability to put those Intel Inside etc. stickers on your product a valuable feature for OEMs when considering whether to buy from Intel or a competitor.

boyaka 12y ago

I got my Dad a NUC for Christmas...He hasn't really been using it yet. I think this might have been a more interesting and simple gift, wish it came out in time. I did get to play with the NUC because I wanted to have it all configured and ready to use. It was interesting to see how they got all of the components packed in and I was impressed by the performance. Main issue I had was graphics support, because I wanted to put Elementary OS on it to see if he'd be interested in trying out Linux. Ended up going with the latest Ubuntu instead (Elementary OS Luna is built on Ubuntu 12.04) which worked fine. My Dad had gone through a couple of those Shuttle "Mini" computers (the motherboards were Flex-ATX, slightly bigger than Mini-ITX and obviously needed to be smaller than micro-ATX), so I thought the NUC (between Nano-ITX and Pico-ITX [1]) might appeal to him. They both died and he's currently using a standard desktop. I believe one or both of his Shuttle's died due to a PSU failure, so it's nice to have the external power brick on the NUC. He and my Mom had previously been using a Windows Media Center desktop with a tuner card and Comcast cable, but they're using DirecTV boxes on all the TVs now so not much need for a HTPC. He said he was thinking about trying to use the NUC with Windows 8 and a touch screen somehow...Not really sure how he can accomplish that. Besides introducing him to Linux, I was thinking he could use it on his TV as just an alternate computer and wanted to show him how to use Synergy to control it with his desktop keyboard/mouse. He's currently switching his TV between the DirecTV box and his desktop as a second display. At the very least it's a backup, and he could potentially take it on trips as a more powerful alternative to a laptop. There's just so many different options for computing these days. It's like information overload, but with hardware. [1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/5800/slimming-desktops-down-intel-reveals-next-unit-of-computing http://www.anandtech.com/show/5800/slimming-desktops-down-in... (existence of Nano-ITX and Pico-ITX pointed out in the comments)

toyg 12y ago
> There's just so many different options for computing these days. It's like information overload, but with hardware. Yeah. I have two Dreamplugs lying there unused at the moment, plus a CuBox used as NAS/TimeMachine, and a MicroPython waiting for some free time... so many options, so little time. They are also getting so powerful, I'm seriously considering a few "enterprise" scenarios. Remember when IT meant mainframes, so individual departments would just bypass them and buy their own PCs? I think we're ready for a new wave of that decentralized approach: between mobile and these little bad boys, there's plenty of power around to run a number of applications that would have required a rack server 5 or 10 years ago. Now John Accountant could just buy a little silent box and put it on his desk, without having to go through hellish rounds of IT approvals.

simi_ 12y ago

> It even has a cute unboxing experience (The box plays the intel jingle when you open it) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjdyudYdIPc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjdyudYdIPc That's very cute, however if it's the box that actually plays the sound isn't it terribly wasteful, ecologically?

riffraff 12y ago
there are birthday card that do the same, it's very little extra stuff compared to the computer itself, I imagine.
- simi_ 12y ago
  Good point. However to me it still just seems terribly wasteful/stupid. Considering the aux battery in most computing devices, couldn't the musical thingie be embedded into the computer itself?
  - asuidyasiud 12y ago
    It is completely irrelevant, ecologically speaking.
    - dingaling 12y ago
      > It is completely irrelevant, ecologically speaking. How so? It makes the box unrecyclable; worse still, as soon as such an item is detected in the recycling plant it will often cause the whole batch of material to be rejected and dumped[1]. No-one has time to pick-through cardboard removing batteries and circuitry. [1] Source: anecdote from a colleague who worked in a 'recyclarium'. Contaminated material causes the line to be stopped, batch dumped and machines cleaned. The actual pre-processing sorting is quite fascinating, using spectrometers to detect the type of materials.
      - vidarh 12y ago
        From one of the comments above: "It's not the box, but a small plastic enclosure" And while I sympathise, consider that this is part of packaging for a computer, where the manufacture of the computer itself will consume many times as many resources, and the power to use the computer over its lifetime will consume many times as many resources. With respect to the overall environmental impact of the purchase of that device, the inclusion of a device like that will be a rounding error.

samcrawford 12y ago

It's not just the NUC; don't forget the Minnowboard Max, which is also Intel-sponsored at least. It has slightly lower specs than this stick, but it's still far more powerful than the R-Pi and great for home automation work. I've got a couple here and I have no real complaints.

yati 12y ago

This. e.g., not many people know that Intel created OpenCV and open sourced it.

greggman 12y ago

I was forced to use NUCs for a project. They were under powered for me. All I needed to do was draw 5 fullscreen quads at 1920x1080 but all they could handle was 4 fullscreen quads at 1280x720. I'm sure they're great for some things so YMMV

walterbell 12y ago
Was that an Ivy Bridge or Haswell GPU?
wilhil 12y ago
To be fair, that is a big requirement... Loads of mid to high end graphics cards from just a few years backfail at dual QHD screen. I power 2x 1920x1080 screens off of a NUC and am very happy.
- kllrnohj 12y ago
  No, it isn't. 1920 * 1080 pixels * 5 * 60 = 622MPixel/s of fillrate required. Radeon 9700 Pro, high end from over 10 years ago, had a fillrate of 2600MPixels/s Let's take a high end graphics card from a few years back, say... GTX 480? A 2010 card? That has a fillrate of 33,600 MPixels/sec. 5x 1920x1080 quads is child's play for any reasonable desktop GPU part. In fact high end cards from 2009 could game at 5760x2160 (that's 6x 1920x1080 displays) off of a single card.

donavanm 12y ago

Most of those examples were tech demonstrators and reference designs, AFAIK. A small number of units, if any, were available. I don't recall many partners bringing them to market. Intel's not in the business of selling a couple thousand of these units, they're looking for OEMs to pick it up and sell millions. Or at least shape/gauge the future market.

_nedR 12y ago
Exactly. Intel seems to be mainly interested in selling more processors and motherboards to OEMs than anything else. Intel seems to intervene on occasion to shake things up or show OEMs how its done. For eg., the Ultrabook was to help laptop manufacturers who were getting clobbered by Apple. NUC was so that OEMs would build competitors (like the Gigabyte BRIX Pro) to the Mac Mini and so on.

sorokod 12y ago

Looks like they just got a version bump http://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-nuc-broadwell,28344.html http://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-nuc-broadwell,28344.h...

minot 12y ago
I hope they make one with a full size HDMI (maybe even HDMI 2?) next year.

macco 12y ago

Do they also have a laptop variant? Their Hardware is actually quite awesome - especially for Linux users

Alupis 12y ago

When I was in the market for a small low-power home server, I actually found the NUC's to be overpriced and under-performing. There's no i7 option, and they will run you about the same base price as an Gigabyte Brix which does offer i7 and/or i5's with more powerful graphics (and AMD APU options for very nice graphics if required). My home server did not require much graphics of course, but the i7 quad core is very much so a nice-to-have. Even a Zotac Zbox with an i5 will get you more bang-for-the-buck since they are about $50-$100 cheaper, and come with more peripherals (like dual Gigabit ethernet ports).

walterbell 12y ago
NUCs are the modern incarnation of Intel whitebox reference motherboards. If they were too cheap or tailored to specific use cases, OEMs would be out of business.
kbenson 12y ago
I don't think Intel necessarily wants to dominate or even lead the market with these offerings, they want to spur the market to fill the niche now that they've shown the demand and the ability(and the parts for sale). Intel didn't want to sell ultrabooks itself, but it very much wanted a vibrant marketplace so it could sell more high-end parts, and keep Apple from leveraging their market position for better pricing from Intel.
- tacotime 12y ago
  I agree. I think they want to more or less be the apple of more open hardware. They aren't planning to make money off NUC, they're planning to make money off their chips. This is ultimately a strategy for getting more people to want more of their chip. Right now all the slickest devices are arm powered... so many shiny glassy sleek looking cell phones and tables and hardly an x86 in sight... They're not selling $/performance here, that's just a barrior to entry, they're selling a vision and a brand... intel inside
Someone 12y ago
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/nuc/products-overview.html http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/nuc/products-overview... has i7 "coming Q2 2015. Prodict details coming soon" Number of cores? That page doesn't say.