ASUS is currently developing a new series of NUC mini PCs that will be powered by the AMD Ryzen AI MAX "Strix Halo" mobile processors. These processors are equipped with oversized iGPUs and CPU core counts that can go as high as 16-core/32-thread "Zen 5." The information about this upcoming product line was discovered in shipping manifests by Olrak29_ as the devices were on their way to undergo testing by the BIS (Bureau of Indian Standards) for regulatory certification, similar to CE standards. The manifest refers to the NUC model as the "NUC14LNS," indicating that it belongs to the NUC 14 series. The NUC sample mentioned in the manifest is said to feature the top-of-the-line Ryzen AI MAX+ 395 processor.
The Ryzen AI MAX+ 395 processor is packed with impressive features, including 16 "Zen 5" CPU cores spread across two CCDs with full 512-bit FPUs. It also boasts 80 MB of "total cache" (L3+L2) between the cores, a 50 TOPS-class NPU for accelerating Microsoft Copilot+, and a large RDNA 3.5 iGPU with 40 compute units (2,560 stream processors), 80 AI accelerators, and 40 ray accelerators. One unique aspect of this NUC is that it will not have SO-DIMM slots due to the "Strix Halo" SoC's 256-bit wide LPDDR5X memory interface. Instead, it will either come with hardwired memory or utilize a pair of LPCAMM2 modules, each with a 128-bit bus width, although the latter option is less likely. With the current trend of AI developers using M4-powered Mac minis to accelerate DeepSeek, it raises the question of whether ASUS is looking to enter the AI market with this new product line.

