Intel Announces It Is Abandoning the Next Unit of Computing (NUC), Its Popular Compact PC Family

Intel is officially exiting the personal computer market, ceasing all investment and development in in Next Unit of Computing (NUC) project — once billed as the future of mainstream computing and still a popular choice as compact yet powerful systems for everything from desktop use to robotics.

"We have decided to stop direct investment in the Next Unit of Compute [sic] (NUC) Business and pivot our strategy to enable our ecosystem partners to continue NUC innovation and growth," an Intel spokesperson confirmed in a statement, following a report on Serve The Home. "This decision will not impact the remainder of Intel’s Client Computing Group (CCG) or Network and Edge Computing (NEX) businesses. Furthermore, we are working with our partners and customers to ensure a smooth transition and fulfillment of all our current commitments — including ongoing support for NUC products currently in market."

Intel launched the Next Unit of Computing (NUC) initiative in 2013, offering a novel form factor measuring just 4×4" and including Intel's low-power Celeron processor with integrated graphics. Over the its ten generations, NUC boards would be launched with a range of processors from the company's Atom, Celeron, Pentium, and Core families, primarily focused on the low-power models.

The NUC range also enjoyed a departure into higher-performance parts in the "Skull Canyon," "Hades Canyon," "Ghost Canyon," "Phantom Canyon," "Panther Canyon," and "Dragon Canyon" models, including in some cases AMD or NVIDIA graphics processors with a focus on gaming performance. The NUC standard even made a brief foray into the world of laptops, though without commercial success.

The small size, relatively low power draw, and surprising compute performance of the NUC systems saw them win favor in a range of markets — including in the embedded sector, where NUCs have often found a use driving robotics and machine learning projects. NVIDIA's Jetson family of embedded systems has been eating into this at the higher end, however, while the Raspberry Pi and similar single-board computers have all-but taken over at the low end.

Finding itself squeezed, then, and at a time when the march of Moore's Law — the observation by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that the number of transistors on a leading-edge part trends towards doubling every 18 months, since turned into a roadmap for the semiconductor industry — is hitting hard physical limits, Intel is opting out: the current generation of NUC systems will be the company's last.