To make NUC PCs more attractive for industrial and edge applications, Asus offers companies the opportunity to customize a mini PC.

For the first time since Asus officially acquired the NUC series from Intel, the company has told The Register how it plans to revive the product. Asus is convinced that there is a large market for mini computers and wants to appeal primarily to industrial customers. For this segment, Asus will make an offer where customers can get the NUC tailored to their needs.

For example, these custom machines allow the customer to add I/O options to the motherboard to their heart’s content. You don’t have to stay within the typical 4 x 4 inch form factor. Asus now has the licenses for this form factor, but expects to be able to offer individual designs upon customer request.

Living on the edge

One market where Asus has its own eyes for its NUC computers is Edge. Edge computing is expected to be at least as lucrative as the public cloud in a few years. A lot of computing power is required to pull large workloads from the cloud and run them on local devices. Asus believes that a NUC PC can provide the ideal solution for this. The manufacturer already has mini computers with Google’s Coral TPUs in its portfolio.

The NUC PCs that Asus has been selling since September are currently still the old Intel models. The company wants to bring the first self-produced models onto the market soon. Asus is targeting the first quarter of 2024, with a first announcement possibly later this year.