Intel wants to sell its last NUC before the end of the year. For a decade, the small computers were used in a wide variety of situations, but the company now believes that developing them is not one of its core tasks.

CEO Pat Gelsinger wants Intel to focus on its core business. The point isn’t intentional, but it sums up the strategy well: In order to remain competitive, Gelsinger wants Intel to build very good CPUs. All activities around are excess fat. Gelsinger wants to save around ten billion euros a year and is using the hatchet to do so.

No further

Now it’s Intel NUC’s turn. NUC stands for Next Unit of Computing. A NUC is essentially a mini PC. Intel launched the boxes in 2013 and then loaded them with laptop chips. This was necessary given the thermal limitations of the case, which was approximately 10cm x 10cm. Over the next decade, NUCs evolved into often very powerful small computers with full desktop chips.

A complete computer was not purchased with the purchase of a NUC. You had to take care of RAM and an HDD or later SSD yourself. The compact computers were used both as small desktops and as edge servers. Today, however, the NUC is somewhat outdated. Small desktops have largely been replaced by laptops, and server manufacturers have released small edge servers specifically for this utility.

What about the partners?

So get rid of NUC. The question is what that means for the various NUC partners that Intel has worked with. For example, last year we wrote about the French Blue Jour, which builds small computers based on NUC components. It’s unclear what impact the Intel division’s closure will have on these partners. There is a chance that they can continue building NUCs on their own initiative. However, the question is how affordable this development will remain in the long term.

For Intel, the cost savings continue. For example, the graphics department had to believe it, RealSense was removed, Optane was thrown into the graveyard, and the SSD business ended up in the window.