Intel Sees Big Future in Tiny PCs

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Mini and tiny PCs are taking over the enterprise space. Will they find a place in your home?

From Intel's event today, we've learned that all-in-ones are a big focal point, but not the only new form factor that the company is targeting for the future. Born from the NUC effort, the mini or tiny PC is set for a record year and is in Intel's eye a "reinvention of the tower."

Intel VP and GM of Desktop Client Platforms Group, Lisa Graff, expressed confidence in this new segment, saying, "This is growing incredibly fast. What we're seeing here is over 1 million units shipped last year – growing from essentially nothing from 2012 – and we expect more than 50 percent growth this year in 2014."

Small form factors are nothing new, of course. So what is it about this new wave that's making them so successful?

"It's so small, it almost disappears," explains Graff. The small size means that it can be placed out of the way in a convenient spot in unconventional places. Intel uses the example of a mini PC being used for navigation on a boat.

It's another classic tale of miniaturization enabling new use cases for existing technology. Intel used the words "easy embedded" to describe some of these use cases.

Story updated with photos.

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Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam served as Tom's Hardware News Director during 2008-2014. He entered tech media in the late 90s and fondly remembers the days when an overclocked Celeron 300A and Voodoo2 SLI comprised a gaming rig with the ultimate street cred.
23 Comments Comment from the forums
  • K2N hater
    Hmmmm these small devices need a new magic name so we can keep singing the "PCs are dead" mantra.
    Reply
  • bak0n
    Can't wait to throw a high powered GPU in it! Oh wait...
    Reply
  • none12345
    Tired of the small movement. As long as its not larger then a file cabinet, i don't care how big it is. The only thing that matters is power. Who cares if its small if its gutless. Gimme power! I miss the old days of hardware doubling ever 6-12 months or so. Now we get 10% every 1-2 years. Boring!
    Reply
  • ferooxidan
    A PC as small as Gigabyte Brix or Asrock Vision X 420D, with the new Nvidia Maxwell GPU and a portable monitor such as ASUS MB168b+. My life is complete.
    Reply
  • KosherGrimace
    They should just make a form factor that's somewhat flat, long, and deep. Like some DVD/BR players.Devices this small remind me of the abuse my GameCube suffered.
    Reply
  • bloodroses75
    They should just make a form factor that's somewhat flat, long, and deep. Like some DVD/BR players.Devices this small remind me of the abuse my GameCube suffered.
    They do in Mini-ITX. Here is one example: http://www.silverstonetek.com/raven/products/index.php?model=RVZ01&area=en&top=C
    Reply
  • Haravikk
    Can't wait to throw a high powered GPU in it! Oh wait...
    Irrelevant; gamers are only a fraction of the desktop market, and even then not all gamers need cutting edge graphics either. For the majority of desktop users, including offices and educational establishments, a small footprint and tiny power consumption makes a lot of sense, especially when they wouldn't be using even a fraction of the internal space of a tower anyway.Even for gamers it's not like you need a full-sized tower anymore; in fact for most people Mini ITX is plenty as it gives you ample room for a good CPU, and the single PCIe slot you need for a good GPU, as one good GPU is usually a lot easier (and often more reliable) than multi-GPU setups anyway. In fact I think the sweet spot for small gaming rigs is going to be a discrete GPU paired with an CPU that has its own integrated GPU, which can be used to offload things like physics. This will be fairly easy to fit in a smaller tower, or even a console-sized device. Even then, integrated graphics are coming on in leaps and bounds; while it may still be a while yet till they're truly competing with discrete graphics, for a modest console a good AMD APU or a Haswell CPU with Iris Pro makes for a pretty decent lightweight gaming machine.To give an example, my current main work machine is a previous generation Mac Pro, and it's a massive, power-hungry workstation tower. But other than four hard-drives I don't have much need for internal space at all, so a lot of it is a waste. Even more so when you consider that these days a quad-core Mac Mini has about the same CPU power (more in many use-cases) as my 8-core (no hyper-threading) machine. If Apple gets a move on and switches the Mac Mini to Haswell or Broadwell then the GPU performance will be about the same too, and I can just swap for the much smaller, much cheaper to run machine. Of course I need to move my hard-drives somewhere, but I can shove those anywhere a Thunderbolt cable can reach.
    Reply
  • GreaseMonkey_62
    Thanks to many improved things such as mSATA, better CPU's and better integrated graphics small computers don't take as much of a performance hit these days as they did a few years ago.
    Reply
  • GreaseMonkey_62
    12922766 said:
    A PC as small as Gigabyte Brix or Asrock Vision X 420D, with the new Nvidia Maxwell GPU and a portable monitor such as ASUS MB168b+. My life is complete.
    The Gigabyte Brix is pretty sweet. Hoping to get my hands on one soon to replace the family computer.
    Reply
  • acadia11
    10 years ago I bought a mac mini. Today intel revolutionizes the PC market!!!!
    Reply