ASRock Industrial maintains a lineup of ultra-compact form-factor machines in the NUC BOX (Intel-based) and 4X4 BOX (AMD-based) series. These systems have gained significant market acceptance (evidenced by the rapid iterations that the company has been able to put out over multiple generations). Being the first to market with the latest platforms has been one of the key reasons behind this.
Both Intel and AMD have started to play up hardware-accelerated AI tasks as a key selling point in recent months. Intel has integrated support for NPUs (Neural Processing Unit - the accelerator for neural networks used in machine learning for the tech-savvy folks / artificial intelligence for the average consumer) in the recently-launched Meteor Lake SKUs. AMD's Phoenix lineup of notebook chips launched earlier this year actually had NPU components on the die in some of the SKUs (AMD's XDNA). This is now receiving more software support and marketing focus after getting re-branded as Ryzen AI in the recently-launched Phoenix refresh (8040 series APUs).
