Intel is abandoning the coolest thing the company makes.

Damn, this is a sad day for the homelab.

The article says Intel is working with partners to “continue NUC innovation and growth”, so we will see what that manifests as.

  • @bertd2English
    16•1 year ago

    I own a bunch of them, generations five through ten, and have always had a love/hate relationship with them. None has ever died on me. My main workstation at home, as well as two “homelab” servers are NUCs. They Just Work<tm> under both Ubuntu and Proxmox.

    The love is for them just working. The hate is for Intel :-)

    What they got wrong:

    • cooling. CPU cooling is finely tuned and controllable through the BIOS, no qualms there. The disk and the NVME SSD have no cooling whatsoever. Sticking an small 40mm fan to the side and running it at the minimum RPM drops the case temperature from 60°C to 40°C and avoids the NVME SSD burning out. Needless to say, a glued on fan looks fugly.
    • opening. By refusing to let their firmware be accessible to the fwupdmgr mechanism, Intel forces its Linux users to physically go to the machine, stick in a USB thumbdrive, keyboard and a monitor, and click their way through the BIOS update. In contrast, my Dell gear gets updated online through fwupdmgr, and I just have to suffer a reboot with a few minutes of downtime. I don’t even have to be at the keyboard.
    • remote monitoring. I bought two NUC’s with vPRO support, to allow for remote management. But the remote console sucks eggs even from a Windows management station, so I wound up disabling it on all of them. Both Dell’s iDRAC and HP’s ILO run circles around vPRO based remote management.

    That’s not a lot to go wrong for such a big endeavour, which is why I will keep hating Intel and sorely missing the upgrade opportunity. Just hoping Dell will step into the void.

    • BarqsHasBiteEnglish
      3•1 year ago

      What do you recommend for desktops that aren’t the big ass tower?

        • BarqsHasBiteEnglish
          3•1 year ago

          Well I’d like better cooling than a laptop, which should make it last longer. But a full size tower just doesn’t seem necessary anymore.

                • BarqsHasBiteEnglish
                  2•1 year ago

                  Well personally for me not a handheld because I still want a computer for office and things like that (and not cheap one because the more RAM the better). I’ve seen people fiddle with their steam deck but I don’t want to bother with that.

        • @zikk_transport2English
          2•1 year ago

          I think user asked for a small factor PC, just like intel nuc. IMO intel nuc is a perfect PC for a work desktop. They can even mount on the back of the monitor - excellent feature. Not sure if any other brand has such feature.

            • @zikk_transport2English
              1•1 year ago

              I get your point and I agree with you, but let me clarify what I was talking about.

              The idea is a very small office where people don’t focus on working with computer, but rather use computer to help certain tasks, process payments, save something to MS Excel and so on. Those people don’t really need laptops, so stationary devices are perfect.

              Just focus on what I wrote. I am the “admin” of such “small office”.

              Intel nuc is perfect solution for me, the performance is more than enough and small size factor really takes the cake. I am really sad that NUC goes away and hope that soon there would be alternative. ✌️

      • @bemenakerEnglish
        2•1 year ago

        Look at minisforum and beelink.

        • @cspiegelEnglish
          1•1 year ago

          I can second Beelink here. I bought a Beelink SER5 for US$380 as a gaming computer for my kids. It’s an AMD Ryzen 7 5800H with a Vega GPU, 16G RAM and a 500GB SSD. It probably won’t work well with the latest graphics-intensive games, but it’s been great so far with a bunch of games my kids like.

          That one worked so well that when I needed a new desktop computer for their schoolwork and similar, I got another Beelink, this time a Mini S12 for US$200. It’s an Intel N95 with 8G RAM and a 256G SSD. Works absolutely fantastically for its purpose.

          Both are tiny and silent.

    • @[email protected]English
      3•1 year ago

      I got one for my mother when she needed a new PC and it died within a month. Not intel’s fault though, chip on the SSD died, first time I’ve seen an m.2 SSD die like that. Replacement going strong.