Stefan Mileschin

As the demand for increased CPU performance has largely plateaued during the past five or so year, Intel has looked to expand into other markets to continue supporting the development of new technologies. Mobile has seen a large upswing in importance, and that looks set to continue, but for those that don’t need a mobile system but might like the power and small form factors associated with mobile devices, Intel created the NUC – the Next Unit of Computing. The idea is to provide all the performance of a mobile platform with the same typical feature set – USB 3.0, USB 2.0, mini-PCIe, and iGPU – without the keyboard, touchpad, display, and speakers that comprise the typical laptop. The target markets include thin clients, point of sales locations, kiosks, digital signage, surveillance, and vending machines (and anything else where you might want a tiny computer box).

Chenbro is showing off their latest NUC box at IDF 2013, the Cubicom 200. Currently supported NUC boards included the Ivy Bridge D53427RKE (Core i5-3427U) and D33217GKE (Core i3-3317U), along with a Sandy Bridge DCP847SKE (Celeron 847). All of the boards have the CPU soldered down, so that aspect is non-upgradeable, but support for two SO-DIMM slots means 16GB is possible on the DCP847SKE, and the D53427RKE even lists up to 32GB of RAM support (with currently difficult/impossible to find 16GB SO-DIMMs). Intel hasn’t formally announced their Haswell NUC boards, but Chenbro says they “will be supporting the new Intel NUC based on 4th generation Intel Core processors”.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7312/c...-nuc-enclosure