A Year After Taking On Intel's NUC Mini-PCs, Asus Says It's Ready To Improve Them

A year after winning the rights to build machines based on Intel's Next Unit of Compute (NUC) mini-PC spec, Taiwan's Asus claims it has stabilized the product line and the team that makes it – and is poised to innovate.

As we reported in the days after Asus took on the NUC, the manufacturer hoped to think outside the 4″ x 4″ box that Intel chose as the housing for NUCs, and develop custom form factors for commercial clients.

Asus still harbors that ambition. But events across the last year made it tricky to realize – for a couple of reasons.

One was that Asus lost some members of Intel's NUC design team. Some customers also took their business elsewhere.

Asus senior vice president Jackie Hsu today told The Register the box-builder now considers its first year as the steward of NUC as its foundational effort. In its second year, innovation and growth will follow.

Some of that innovation will address the needs of orgs that want to put generative AI to work in customer-facing kiosks. NUCs are famously used in McDonald's touchscreen self-serve kiosks in Australia. Hsu said more retailers are looking for kiosks that use generative AI to handle customer inquiries with real-time conversational interfaces.

Asus's plan to develop custom NUCs remains in place and Hsu said the ambition to create such machines will be important as retailers contemplate physical designs that work on the shop floor.

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Partnerships with Nvidia and Microsoft are in place to get accelerators and Copilot working in next-gen NUCs. The Register couldn't resist asking if Asus would contemplate using Qualcomm's Snapdragon Elite processors – the only ones Microsoft currently rates as suitable for its flagship Copilot+ PCs. We were told Asus hasn't closed its partnership books.

Indeed, the newly-appointed general manager of the Asus NUC business unit, KW Chao, made clear it will consider other partners "based on customer demand."

Hsu said another source of growth for the NUC business is Asus's recent decision to reorganize two divisions that worked on servers into one. That team now targets three markets: cloud service providers, large buys such as enterprises or HPC operators, and vertical markets such as manufacturers.

The server team's focus on those markets means Asus's commercial teams have a chance to learn how to better pitch NUCs beyond traditional markets like digital signage. Asus believes its experience building supercomputers and clouds means buyers will feel it can match the likes of Lenovo in terms offering stacks comprising servers, storage, and small client devices.

Hsu said the NUC is therefore opening doors for Asus's commercial sales teams – a welcome side-effect of its deal with Intel.

While the majority of NUC sales will be to commercial buyers, the small PCs' loyal gaming clientele have not been forgotten: one of Asus's first NUCs bore its Republic of Gamers brand, and Chao told The Register a sequel is in the works. ®