ASUS is working on a new line of NUC mini PCs powered by the AMD Ryzen AI MAX "Strix Halo" mobile processors that come with oversized iGPUs and CPU core counts as high as 16-core/32-thread "Zen 5." This was sniffed out in shipping manifests by Olrak29_ on its way to being tested by the BIS (Bureau of Indian Standards) for regulatory certification similar to CE, with the manifest describing the NUC model as the "NUC14LNS," meaning that this box is from the NUC 14 series. The manifest describes the NUC sample as featuring the top of the line Ryzen AI MAX+ 395.

The Ryzen AI MAX+ 395 maxes out everything on the silicon, featuring 16 "Zen 5" CPU cores across two CCDs with full 512-bit FPUs, with 80 MB of "total cache" (L3+L2) between them; a 50 TOPS-class NPU that can locally accelerate Microsoft Copilot+, and that large RDNA 3.5 iGPU with 40 compute units (2,560 stream processors), 80 AI accelerators, and 40 ray accelerators. What's interesting about this NUC is that it will not come with SO-DIMM slots, since the "Strix Halo" SoC features a 256-bit wide LPDDR5X memory interface. It will either have hardwired memory, or use a pair of LPCAMM2 modules (each with a 128-bit bus width), which is less likely. With all the rage about AI developers using M4-powered Mac minis to accelerate DeepSeek, is ASUS eying a slice of the AI market?