Asus and Intel have made an agreement, which allows the Taiwanese hardware manufacturer to continue producing the NUCs previously manufactured by Intel with 10th to 13th generation processors. New developments for the 14th generation are also possible under the agreement.
Asus is forming one for this purpose new department (Business Unit). Existing Intel customers should also receive support for existing products from Asus. This is particularly important for companies that use many of the devices and therefore regularly rely on spare parts or the occasional exchange model. Exactly when and to what extent this will happen has not yet been announced.
Asus thanked Intel for the trust and stated that the cooperation will further accelerate and improve the development of mini PCs in the future. So far, Asus has already offered its own mini PCs, which differ in detail from Intel NUCs in terms of structure. Some of these computers should be equipped with the Intel Meteor Lake CPUs expected in the fall by the end of the year.
Security, support and high availability are important for enterprise customers
Among other things, the computers were popular with companies because Intel, as the developer and manufacturer of all essential components, was able to offer extensive control over important functions such as security patches for the BIOS and remote maintenance functions (vPro). For commercial customers in particular, these are often mandatory features, without which a system cannot even be shortlisted.
The agreement between Asus and Intel is not exclusive, so other manufacturers could join in the future. Lenovo, Msi and Zotac are the largest other mini PC manufacturers alongside Asus. There are no announcements about this yet. The original Intel NUCs are currently still readily available, presumably until stocks are exhausted. The dealer notebooks cheaper has, for example, a whole series of devices that can be delivered immediately.