84 PCWorld JUNE 2022FEATURE DEEP INSIDE INTEL’S NUC
“We’re of course working closely with the
Arc team,” said Patterson. The NUC team was
especially coy on this point, as no one in the
room wanted to steal the Arc team’s thunder.
Whatever form Arc takes, it may not be a
closely integrated, on-board solution. NUC’s
enthusiast team has looked at this option for a
variety of desktop graphics cards, including
those from AMD and Nvidia. In theory, this
might repeat the success of Hades Canyon—
but the team prefers to take a standards-
based approach.
“We’ve explored some ideas, like taking
the desktop class graphics chip and soldering
it down. Maybe there’s other ways of cooling
it. But we don’t think that’s the right path,”
said Habib.
He points out that while this might make
enthusiast NUCs slightly smaller, it’s not a
cheat code, and cooling a soldered desktopGPU with a TDP in the hundreds of watts
would remain challenging. The flexibility of a
standards-based approach, on the other
hand, opens up options to turn up
performance for the most demanding
workloads—or stick to more efficient
hardware for less onerous tasks.TO THE NEXT 90 MILLION
NUCS
Despite these hurdles, the NUC group looks
toward its next decade with a sense of
optimism. The lessons of the last decade
have provided the group a template for
designing NUCs not just as computers but as
pillars of design others can buy, use, and
build from.
“We want to take reference designs a
step further and show not just the art of
possible, but the art of possible at scale,”
said McCarson. “It’s one
thing to do a one off. It’s
another to do it in a million-
unit quantity.”
And he’s serious about
scale. McCarson mentioned
his hopes that we’ll be
talking about the group
shipping its 100 millionth
NUC a decade from now. It’s
an ambitious goal, one he
seems confident the NUC
group’s past experience has
prepared it to achieve.Intel’s enthusiast NUCs are growing in size but remain smaller than
the competition.