Intel
Intel has updated its range of small form-factor PCs that it calls NUCs. We’ve generally liked the systems in the past; with a footprint of about 4 inches by 4 inches, they’re pretty compact, and their feature set makes them versatile for home theaters, digital signs or other embedded industrial uses, workplace productivity, and in some cases, even gaming.
First up is a quintet of NUC kits named Bean Canyon, built around Coffee Lake-U processors. These range from a $ 299 i3-8109U at the low end (two-core, four-thread, 3.0-3.6GHz) to a $ 499 i7-8559U at the high end (four-core, eight-thread, 2.7-4.5GHz). All the chips are 28W processors, and all have Iris Plus graphics—128MB of eDRAM memory on the processor itself. The eDRAM is primarily there to boost graphics performance, but it can also help a lot in non-graphical workloads, too, as it acts as an enormous cache.