The success of Apple’s MacMini has not gone unnoticed by PC manufacturers. At the CES in Las Vegas the mini PC seems to be on the rise. These are compact PCs that are supplied without a keyboard, mouse and screen and are therefore attractively priced.
The Mini PC is certainly not a new phenomenon, although until now it was mainly unknown manufacturers who brought such devices onto the market. For example, the new generation of Mini PCs combines a Qualcomm processor or Intel’s Core Ultra Series 2 chips with a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) for local AI acceleration and comes with Microsoft’s AI assistant CoPilot.
You won’t find CoPilot Plus anywhere in classic PC towers, which are going out of fashion anyway. Consumers prefer a compact device that they can place on their desk. The PC tower is better suited for expansion and often has a CD player on board. CoPilot Plus can already be found in various laptops, but they are still on the pricey side.
Asus was the first PC manufacturer to announce a mini PC that is Copilot Plus compatible, back in September. The full specs of its upcoming NUC 14 Pro AI were revealed shortly before CES. Asus’ mini PC even has a Copilot button on the front and is almost identical in size to Apple’s latest Mac Mini. The Asus model also looks nice, which cannot be said of every mini PC.
Taiwanese company Geekom is even unveiling three new mini PCs at CES, one with Strix Point CPUs from AMD and one with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite processor, both of which are compatible with Copilot Plus. The third model is powered by Intel’s unannounced Arrow Lake-H laptop processors, and will have to make do without Copilot Plus.
Other brands are also showing Mini PCs, for example Acer is launching the Revo Box AI, and HP is demonstrating the deep black Z2 Mini G1a at CES, which looks more like a heating stove.
It may take some time before Copilot Plus features run on traditional high-performance desktop PCs. Intel’s latest Core Ultra desktop CPU arrived in October with an NPU that falls just short of reaching the 40 TOPS requirement that Microsoft mandates for Copilot Plus features.
Source: www.emerce.nl
