MINIX N304-AI Packs Intel Wildcat Lake and a 15-TOPS NPU Into a Budget Mini PC

A Tiny Desktop Built Around Intel's Wildcat Lake

MINIX introduced the N304-AI on June 15, 2026, a compact, budget-oriented mini PC built on Intel's new Core 3 N304 "Wildcat Lake" processor. It is squarely aimed at the practical end of computing — home offices, classrooms, retail and digital signage, and light edge-computing duties — and it leans on an on-chip NPU to handle local AI workloads without reaching for the cloud.

The Wildcat Lake Silicon

The Core 3 N304 is a five-core, six-thread part pairing one performance core with four efficiency cores. On its own that is a modest, power-sipping CPU, but the interesting number for an AI-era mini PC is the NPU: roughly 15 TOPS dedicated to neural inference, with MINIX citing about 24 TOPS combined across CPU, GPU, and NPU. That is enough headroom for on-device tasks like background blur, local transcription, and lightweight model inference — the kinds of features that used to demand far bigger hardware.

Specs That Punch Above the Price Bracket

MINIX equipped the N304-AI with 16GB of LPDDR5x-6400 memory and a 512GB PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe SSD — a genuinely usable baseline rather than the bare-minimum configs that plague the budget tier. Connectivity is similarly complete.

Connectivity and Display

- Triple display output via HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 1.4, supporting up to three monitors

- Dual Gigabit Ethernet, a welcome touch for routing, firewall, or homelab roles

- Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.3

- USB 3.2 Gen 2, including Type-C and Type-A ports

- Windows 11 Pro preinstalled

Dual GbE in particular signals that MINIX expects some buyers to press this into service as a compact router or self-hosted services box, not just a desktop.

Where the N304-AI Fits

For a small business deploying point-of-sale terminals, a school outfitting a computer lab, or a maker who wants a quiet always-on machine for edge AI experiments, a small, affordable, NPU-equipped mini PC hits a real sweet spot. The triple-display support makes it a credible productivity desktop, while the low power draw keeps it viable for 24/7 signage and edge roles.

A Note on Pricing

MINIX has not yet announced pricing or availability. Given the positioning and the company's track record in the budget segment, the value proposition will hinge on landing aggressively against other N-series machines. We will update our mini computer coverage once final numbers arrive.

The Takeaway

The MINIX N304-AI is a tidy example of how on-device AI acceleration is trickling down into genuinely affordable hardware. A 15-TOPS NPU, 16GB of fast memory, and triple-display output in a palm-sized chassis is a strong recipe for the everyday computing it targets.

Sources: Liliputing (June 15, 2026).