Today, you can upgrade a desktop PC’s gaming performance just by plugging in a new graphics card. What if you could do the same exact thing with everything else in that computer — slotting in a cartridge with a new CPU, memory, storage, even a new motherboard and set of ports? What if that new “everything else in your computer” card meant you could build an upgradable desktop gaming PC far smaller than you’d ever built or bought before?
Last week, I visited Intel’s headquarters in Santa Clara, California so I could stop imagining and check out the NUC 9 Extreme for myself.
The linked The Verge article is a decent overview, but for more information, I’d suggest watching Gamers Nexus’ Stephen Burke’s (praise be upon Him) video, to get an even better idea of what Intel is trying to do here. It’s certainly a very fascinating product, and I’m very happy to finally see a major player trying to do something new to combine small form factors with easy expandability and upgradeability.
I still have many questions, though, most importantly about just how open this platform – if it even is a platform to begin with – really is. The bridge board that the processor PCIe card and GPU slot into looks quite basic, and there already seem to be multiple variants of said board from different manufacturers, so I hope AMD could just as easily build a competing module. If not, buying into this platform would tie you down to Intel, which, at this point in time, might not be the optimal choice.
Sounds to me like the NUBUS cards for Apple Macs back in the 90s. Great concept, but they were always expensive and limited in how much extra performance you could buy, as Apple Really wanted you to buy a whole new Mac
I kind of like the existing form factor of the nuc, with external usb/thunderbolt graphics card enclosure. You get the power when you need, or the portability otherwise. No need for a separate platform that’s more expensive and is more propritary
I’d like better/quieter cooling, a internal PSU, multi-gig NICs, and provisions for a discreet card on the performance NUCs (NICs, quad nvme card, GPU, etc.). This address most of those items. The cooling is TBD.
I don’t think the other NUC styles is going away. This is just the form for the high end NUCs which were already pushing the limits of the form factor.
Fair point on cooling. I’d love to see someone rig up a water cooler inside the smallest nuc. That would be entertaining.
Bill Shooter of Bul,
You could fill the whole case with mineral water. Not because it’s practical, but just because you can, haha.
https://www.pugetsystems.com/submerged.php
So they discovered PCIe riser cards?
It’s an interesting evolution of the high perf NUCs. The PCIe interface is probably going to be limiting, and I would have like to see something like oculink to a hotswap cage for the nvme drives instead of mounting them on motherboard.
I would also like to see mobile Xeons, server Atoms, or Xeon-Ds with ECC RAM in this form factor. Probably not going to happen, but it would be nice for building small clusters. 🙂
Flatland_Spider,
Yes it would be nice. On the one hand many of our PC standards are extremely dated and could probably benefit from a redesign, however abandoning those standards adds a new risk of vender locking. I’m wary of things like the macpro trashcan where users are stuck with whatever the manufacturer allows. Even in the new macpro that uses mostly standardized parts, apple uses DRM-like technology to lock down hardware and prevent users from installing NVMe drives on their own for example. So although I’m not against the idea of updating industry standards for the future, I think we as consumers need to be very careful to protect our own interests in the process and not be taken advantage of. I don’t want to loose freedoms via sneaky corporate restrictions.
Oculink was created by the PCIe SIG.
https://blog.exxactcorp.com/need-know-oculink-technology/
https://pcisig.com/specifications/review-zone (The actual spec is blocked.)
Really what in hell this is not new other than a fancy case. Was the first thing that crossed my mind.
Industrial pcs you find passive backplanes are not new.
https://www.esis.com.au/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/PCE-5B10_12_13_18_19_16Q_08_09Q_13_19.pdf
Yes what this thing is is just really a passive backplane but there are a few problems when you look closer.
Now lets say we take a closer look at one of these industrial cpu boards.
https://www.esis.com.au/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/PCE-3028_DS.pdf
Do you notice the problem yet. The industrial is a PCIe 16 slot + a PCIe 8 slot on the cpu board in the compact form. Intel’s Ghost Canyon NUC is only a PCIe 16 slot on edge only. So IO it crippled badly.
Next the cpu is socket-ed on the industrial boards in most cases. Intel’s Ghost Canyon NUC yep its the laptop chip soldered on to the board. So worse upgrade ablity yet they are selling it as modular.
One thing I do agree with is that Intel Ghost Canyon Nuc is a double width board instead of the old single width.
It would have been nice if this was a true picmg 1.3 half board in double width on back for ports. Yes that would have been PCIe 16 slot + PCIe 8 slot on the cpu card. So 24 Pcie instead of 16.
Case would have to be a little longer to take a pcimg 1.3 half board but to take full length graphics cards or other cards it need to be that length any how. Being proper picmg 1.3 would have been proper future proof.
Yeah, chassis switches and blade servers are exactly what I thought about when I saw the teardown.
This would have been more interesting had it been more like a blade with all of the ports on the chassis. They could have made something like the SoC compute modules and baseboards from RPi or Pine64. Then people could have created things like the Pine64 Clusterboard (https://www.pine64.org/clusterboard/)
Overall, it’s a good start given how conservative PC parts companies/consumers can be. We’re lucky everything doesn’t still come with a parallel port and ISA slots.
Come on. Everyone knows Intel chips are deathly allergic to PCIe lanes. You should see all the microcode to keep the chip from going into anaphylactic shock. ;P Anyway… Given Intel’s stance of treating PCIe lanes like a sacred resource, it isn’t surprising anything new from them would be handicapped in this regard.
I think this is a fair trade off. Most people are going to add a GPU, and that’s it. Some weirdos will add things like a quad port 10G NIC, a quad NVMe card, or an external HBA to a RAID chassis, but not many.
More slots and you get into mini-ITX and microATX territory.
Overall, I think this is a nice advancement of the line. The marketing department is dressing up perfectly good pigs, but that’s what marketing departments do. XD
I wanted to see them do a pizza box, but whatever.
The linked video mentions a couple of other vendors who will be building cases around this which are longer then the Intel reference case to accommodate full-size video cards.
Nothing about the NUC line is future proof. It’s a playground of Intel, and that’s kind of the deal. The next generation could be radically different.
Do look closer they put pcie x4 m.2 on the backplane. Nice hell so no full 16 x pcie for GPU when you have m.2 on the backplane.
pcie x16 + a pcie x8 would have been the correct amount of connect to the backplane so the backplane was fully functional.
>>More slots and you get into mini-ITX and microATX territory.
Horrible its not for mini-ITX. You can put a daughter board out a mini-itx pcie x16 slot and provide the same stuff intel has placed on that backplane with all the same issues. One big different you get mini-itx with dual 10G network ports with dual gigabyte on them. So a mini-itx with riser is a more powerful solution than this Intel nuc offering.
pice x16 with pcie x8 from cpu board would have placed it nicely in the middle between mini-ITX and mircoATX. But no this is not where Intel decide to go.
So something less up-gradable than a mini-ITX solution without any particular feature advantage.
Yes, and I consider the 4x port useless. They shouldn’t have included it. The majority of GPUs are 2 slots wide, so the 4x slot is going to get covered up.
Really it should have been an 8x slot instead of a 4x with the ability to split the 16 PCIe lanes between the 16x slot and 8x slot. There is a lot more you can do with two 8x slots then a 16x slot and 4x slot.
It does have an internal PSU unlike most super small mini-ITX builds. 🙂
10G is probably a stretch for this considering it’s high end consumer stuff. 10G is too finicky for the majority of home users. The tolerances are too tight, and it really works better with twinax DACs or fiber, both of which need SPF+. I don’t think asking for dual 1Gbps/2.5Gbps/5Gbps NICs are out of the question though.
This is fine for what it is, laptop hardware in a desktop form factor. As much as I would like to see server hardware in this form factor, I don’t think that’s going to happen.
pcie x4 m.2 << I was not talking about the useless pcie x4 next to the pcie x16 I agree it would have made more sense for that to be a 8x pcie except they could not.
The back-plane in the Intel design has a m.2 slot on it a pcie x4 m.2 slot. So as soon as you stick a storage m.2 in there by by 16x pcie to graphics card. That m.2 is not blocked from being populated. This is also why you don't have a pcie x8 next to a pcie x16.
It does have an internal PSU << That a case thing ITX. The power supply in the intel nuc case is one of the standard sizes case sizes you can get for some ITX cases. Flex ATX powersupply. Some of your PICMG1.3 stuff takes the same powersupply size.
There are single boards that can be used with the wattage of the intel nuc mess here that could allow people implementing the Nuc to use a external brick and make the nuc a little shorter was well.
As much as I would like to see server hardware in this form factor, << If you are willing to pay the coin for the PICMG 1.3 parts and cases you could have something using server grade parts in basically the same form factor hard part is getting a small backplane generally they are a 6 slot instead of a 4 slot..
This is my problem please someone make us PICMG 1.3 cpu half board using AM4 with a decent heat-sink(should be doable 2 slot width considering how much heat GPU make).. With a nice sanely wired up PICMG 1.3 half back plane(half means no old PCI slots but is a pcie x16+ x8 from cpu card ie 24 pcie lanes to play with). With a decent flex ATX powersupply. Something like this will be the same size on desk/floor as the intel NUC.
So intel made their own version of mini-ITX + riser-card?
It not a riser-card. A riser-card plugs into motherboard. Backplane is “motherboard plugs into backplane”.
The advantage is the Backplane gets to remain in place when you pull out motherboard. With a riser-card to remove motherboard you have to remove riser as well and possible unplug what is in the riser.
The industrial design does have some advantages. But it would have been better if this was not reinvent wheel with a new standard.