AMD begins assault on NUC market

BROADENING ITS ASSAULT ON INTEL WITH A NEW LINE OF MINI PCS.

Intel’s NUCs are small ‘mini PCs’ themselves, with fully-contained systems that often dip down to smaller than a litre. Intel designs and sells the motherboards for the barebone systems, and you can also order NUCs with components already installed, like memory and storage, from third-party retailers. However, the term ‘NUC,’ which is short for Next Unit of Computing, is an Intel branding for those small systems, so AMD has officially embraced ‘Mini PC’ branding, although a few of its partners are using NUC naming conventions for their products.

Unlike Intel’s approach with NUCs, which involves creating the motherboards and selling them to third-party vendors that add their own differentiating features, AMD’s Mini PC efforts consist of enabling an ecosystem of partners to use its Ryzen Embedded V1000 and R1000 processors as the linchpin for their own designs. AMD’s R1000 series come as BGA-mounted SoCs, meaning they won’t install in a normal desktop PC motherboard, and feature Zen+ CPU cores paired with the Vega 3 graphics engine.