Intel Discontinues Hades Canyon NUCs With Kaby Lake-G CPUs

Is Hades Canyon supposed to be a play on words referencing Devil's Canyon? I never really understood the point of NUCs to begin with. I always thought of them as "Laptops that aren't" or "Almost-All-In-Ones" because they lack a display. They're 100% proprietary, less powerful than conventional desktops and disposable, just like laptops and All-In-Ones.

Avro Arrow said:

I never really understood the point of NUCs to begin with.

That NUC is a nice living room computer for a large TV, if you're an adult and don't want a loud tower in that room. May people want a pad, or a laptop, and to each his own.

I would have preferred Hades Canyon to have had an NVIDIA GPU, but I bought it anyway.

8iltvku said:

That NUC is a nice living room computer for a large TV, if you're an adult and don't want a loud tower in that room.

Ok, you're assuming two falsehoods there:

#1 - Being an adult doesn't mean that you care about the size of your living room computer. I'm over 40 and I have a gigantic tower in my living room (60cm tall x 60cm deep x 23cm wide). Now, to be fair, my home is definitely not small and neither is my living room but that's nothing to do with my age (or maybe it is, since us older guys tend to have larger living spaces). I suppose it's possible that if someone lives in a postage stamp-sized studio apartment then maybe they would want something smaller but then they probably won't have a big TV either from lack of a place to put it. Remember that people of all ages have all different tastes and wanting a tiny (and mostly useless) PC in your living room doesn't make you more of an adult than anyone else.

#2 - You said "loud tower" as if having a larger case makes the computer louder when the opposite is true. A case doesn't make noise, the parts inside do and a larger case does a better job of muffling the sound. Also, the larger a case is, the quieter it is (believe it or not) because you can use larger fans that spin slower because the case is larger and will have naturally better airflow. It's like comparing a triple-fan video card to a dual-fan. The triple-fan card will be quieter AND cooler despite having three fans instead of two.

8iltvku said:

I would have preferred Hades Canyon to have had an NVIDIA GPU, but I bought it anyway.

Are you using this thing for gaming? You should never choose a computer that has non-upgradeable Intel Graphics if you want to game with it. If you're not using it for gaming, then an nVidia GPU would be the worst choice because ATi and Intel IGPs are on-die and are far more energy efficient. Since nVidia doesn't make CPUs, their GPUs are all separate. For non-3D applications, you wouldn't be able to tell one from the other because 2D and multimedia was made absolutely perfect more than ten years ago. The only difference between them are their 3D accelerators. Wanting an nVidia GPU for 2D applications is a bad idea.

8iltvku said:

May people want a pad, or a laptop, and to each his own.

That doesn't change the fact that I never saw the point of them. You're also drawing a false equivalency with laptops and tablets. Laptops and tablets are specialised for mobile computing and connectivity that can be used anywhere because they have integrated displays and are designed for portability. They have a very specific purpose that they excel at.

The NUC does not fit into in their category. The NUC is in the category of the "All-In-One" which has a display but has zero portability. Modern components generate a lot of heat, too much for a form-factor like that to be useful so mini-ITX probably killed it because mini-ITX is tiny, upgradeable, standardised, and far less expensive that Intel's NUC.

Finally Intel abandons Kaby Lake-G SoCs. Lesson learnt. Perhaps Intel should use NVidia or its own DG1 next time... :p