Enlarge / Intel's NUC 12 Extreme kit. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

When Intel announced that it was discontinuing its line of NUC mini PCs earlier this month, the company's statement left the door open for future development; Intel was stopping "direct investment" and would rely on "ecosystem partners to continue NUC innovation and growth." Now one specific ecosystem partner is picking up where Intel left off—the company announced today that PC manufacturer Asus will be taking over the NUC lineup going forward.

Asus is being granted a "non-exclusive license" to Intel's NUC designs, which leaves the door open to other companies being granted a license as well. Intel also says Asus will "manufacture, sell, and support" current NUC systems using 10th, 11th, 12th, and 13th-generation Intel processors.

We've reached out to Intel to see whether this means that current NUC owners should contact Asus for warranty, driver, and BIOS support going forward. It sounds like Intel will continue to handle warranty support for now, though this may change by the end of the three-year warranty period that covers most NUCs.

Enlarge / A stack of Intel's NUC mini PCs. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Since 2012, Intel has designed and sold its own lineup of mini PCs . The Next Unit of Computing series (NUC— rhymes with yuck—was always a weird name) was always most closely associated with a series of Mac mini-like desktops, but over the years, it grew to encompass compact workstations and gaming systems as well as mini servers with multiple Ethernet ports.

But Intel is apparently throwing in the towel on the NUC , according to a statement given to The Verge earlier today.

Intel spokesperson Mark Walton said that Intel had "decided to stop direct investment in the Next Unit of Compute (NUC) Business and pivot our strategy to enable our ecosystem partners to continue NUC innovation and growth." This statement leaves some wiggle room—Intel could still work with partners to bring NUCs or NUC-like products to market—but it seems like the days of Intel designing its own desktop computers are over.

Enlarge / Intel's new "Raptor Canyon" NUC Extreme (rear) is a lot larger but also a lot more capable than previous NUC Extreme boxes (front). (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Intel's NUC (Next Unit of Computing) desktops rose to prominence about a decade ago by being small; they were essentially laptops without screens or batteries, crammed inside a tiny box.

But in the years since, Intel has flirted with larger NUCs. They have always been relatively small, but as they graduated from dedicated laptop GPUs to regular dedicated GPUs to even-larger dedicated GPUs, the NUC Extreme PCs have steadily grown to the point that they're now encroaching on do-it-yourself desktops built around mini ITX motherboards, small SFX power supplies, and other size-conscious components.

Enter " Raptor Canyon ," the latest and largest in Intel's line of desktop PCs. It replaces the " Dragon Canyon " NUC design and improves upon it by making room for longer triple-slot GPUs—up to 12 inches (or just over 300 mm) long. That's not enough space for one of Nvidia's massive RTX 4090 and 4080 cards, but it can fit just about anything else.

Enlarge / "Serpent Canyon" could be Intel's next "enthusiast"-class NUC box, and the first with a dedicated Intel GPU. (credit: Baidu )

Intel's "Phantom Canyon" NUC sits in between the company's standard square NUC mini PCs and the expandable NUC Extreme boxes in size, performance, and expandability. It's much smaller than the NUC Extreme boxes and still fits a dedicated GPU and more powerful CPU, but like the smallest NUCs, those components are laptop-class components that can't be upgraded.

The next-generation follow-up to Phantom Canyon is supposedly around the corner, according to plausible-looking leaked images and specs from a Chinese forum post ( via Tom's Hardware ). The new NUC, purportedly codenamed "Serpent Canyon," combines a Core i7-12700H CPU (six P-cores and eight E-cores) with one of Intel's Arc A770M GPUs, making it the first of these high-performance NUC boxes without an AMD or Nvidia GPU in it. The Phantom Canyon NUC uses a 4-core Core i7-1165G7 and an Nvidia RTX 2060 GPU, so Serpent Canyon should be quite a bit more powerful overall.

Serpent Canyon will be a bit chunkier than the Phantom Canyon box it replaces, but it should be considerably more powerful. (credit: Baidu )

The Serpent Canyon photos make it look chunkier than the Phantom Canyon box, which as Tom's Hardware points out is a likely side effect of the higher-performance CPU and GPU—more power means more cooling and thus a larger case. But the PC should still offer impressive performance for its size, and its array of USB, Ethernet, Thunderbolt, HDMI, and DisplayPort outputs should accommodate most peoples' accessories and multi-monitor setups. Like Intel's other high-performance NUCs, it also has a lit-up skull on the side. This may or may not make it go faster.