Intel’s VR-ready Mini PC Lets You Ditch the Desktop

For most personal technology choices, the lines of division are clearly drawn. You're either an Android person or an iPhone person. Xbox or PlayStation. AMD or Intel. Well, hold up. That last one just got complicated. You see, there's a brand new chip on the market that joins a quad-core 8th-generation Intel processor with a RX Vega M graphics chip from AMD, mashing them together on the same hunk of silicon. Just a few years ago, this was an unthinkable alliance—like Han Solo and Boba Fett sitting down for a nice cup of tea, or Lex Luthor and Superman going to the movies together.

The main reason why these two would make nice? Intel's normal built-in UHD Graphics, even in their most potent configurations, aren't great. The graphics chips are fine for consumer-level systems, but gamers find Intel's chips to be largely useless. So, AMD's latest Vega architecture has been tapped to give Intel's otherwise solid offering a huge boost.

This unlikely partnership is also why we now have Intel's latest, fastest mini PC. Though you'll be able to get these new Intel chips with AMD graphics in laptops, the new Hades Canyon NUC (which stands for "Next Unit of Computing") is a showcase for what frenemies can accomplish. Past NUC models focused on good-enough performance for everyday users, but this new model pulls out the stops in the name of and demanding games and media production suites. The higher-powered version of the Hades Canyon NUC even can handle VR, something only huge, 'roided-out desktops could do just a couple of years ago.