While it certainly did not abandon the enthusiast PC market, it appears that Intel is putting a lot of focus on small form-factor (SFF) market.

With the introduction of Next Unit of Compute (NUC) systems, Compute Stick, upcoming Mini Lake as well as recent announcement of a new 5x5 motherboard factor, it is obvious that Intel has a lot of hope for the SFF PC market. According to Intel, mini PC should be everything that takes under 3L of volume. What makes it interesting is that Intel will offer wide range of processors for such PCs, including ultra low-power Atom SoC, Celeron and even Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs.




Latest research by IDC suggest that a total available market for mini PCs will reach six million units and grow to eight million units in 2018, and it appears that Intel wants a biggest part of that cake. Most of these Compute Stick that you can get today are pretty much based on smartphone and tablet Mediatek SoCs and run on Android OS, but Intel will push that further.




Intel certainly puts a lot of hope on SFF PC market and it wants to take it to a whole new level.



Source: Kitguru.net.