Intel's NUC, or next unit of computing, platform is a refreshingly new idea. Essentially what Intel have created is an ultra compact PC standard that they want to be the future of computing. Measuring in at just 12 by 11 by 4cm the Intel NUC is an impressive small standardised computer that is capable of more than you might expect. Since low power and small Intel CPUs have come quite a long way since the days of quite mediocre "nettop" Atom systems, such as a couple we reviewed a while ago based on the Atom D525, we have great expectations for the Intel NUC. The Intel NUC joins a rather crowded market place for small form factor systems and faces competition from Zotac's ZBox and Sapphire Edge PCs. However, the NUC's similarities with its competitors end there because what the NUC platform does is try and carry over that high level of performance we'd expect to see from a desktop PC - or at least it should do better than its Atom based counter parts that other hardware companies are selling. Intel's NUC is going to be available with Celeron, Pentium, Core i3, Core i5 and Core i7 processors. Also since the NUC is a reference platform, we will see Intel partners able to create their own versions such as the Gigabyte BRIX we saw at Computex. In any case the Intel NUC is the starting point of a drive towards smaller form factor everyday PCs. Today we have with us Intel's "DCCP847DYE" NUC and that means it is running a rather modest ULV Celeron 847 Dual Core 32nm Sandy Bridge based processor running at 1.1GHz with no hyperthreading and 2MB of L3 Cache.



Link: eTeknix