Andrew Cunningham
When Intel announced it was discontinuing its NUC mini PC line earlier this month, the company’s announcement left the door open for future development; Intel was suspending “direct investment” and relying on “environmental partners to continue NUC technology and growth.” Now another natural partner is picking up where Intel left off – the company announced today that PC maker Asus will be taking the NUC series to move forward.
Asus is being granted a “non-exclusive license” to Intel’s NUC designs, which leaves the door open for other companies to be licensed as well. Intel also says Asus will “manufacture, sell, and support” current NUC systems using Intel’s 10th, 11th, 12th, and 13th-generation Intel processors.
We’ve reached out to Intel to see if this means NUC owners need to contact Asus for warranty, driver, and BIOS support moving forward. It sounds like Intel will continue to support it for now, though that may change at the end of the three-year warranty that covers most NUCs.
“Intel stands behind Intel NUC products and will continue to provide warranty and technical support for Intel NUCs,” Intel spokesman Brent Camara told Ars. “The existing support systems will continue to work at this time. If this changes, Intel will notify its customers and distributors.”
We are still waiting for a response on driver and BIOS support, and will update if we receive a response.
Asus is already selling its line of NUC-like mini desktops, and it’s in again compact computer gamesuch as Intel’s advanced NUC platforms. The company should be ready to continue development on various NUC products, although it is not clear if the NUC design will replace its own Asus design or if the company will continue to manufacture, sell, and support two completely different models. mini-desktop lineups.
The next-generation NUCs could bring significant changes to the lineup, assuming they use Intel processors the next generation of Meteor Lake processors (smaller NUCs often use laptop processors). Meteor Lake will be the first Intel CPU not made by Intel itself, instead using chipset “tiles” from Intel and TSMC. One of those tiles will be an updated GPU that uses the same architecture as Intel’s Arc GPUs, which should boost performance (the current Intel Xe GPU hasn’t changed much in three generations) and add new capabilities like AV1 video recording.