Intel unveiled its new Meteor Lake platform in mid-December. By now, the first devices powered by this hardware have been announced.
ASUS is releasing a new NUC 14 in two flavors. The models are pretty much the same, except one is slightly bigger and has a SATA storage option, while the other doesn’t. They both have two NVME slots (both PCIe 4.0 x4), one 2280, one 2242, as well as 1x Intel i226V 2.5GbE Ethernet. A WiFi module is soldered right onto the board. Other than that, they come in the usual NUC form factor and are very energy efficient.
https://www.asus.com/displays-desktops/nucs/nuc-mini-pcs/asus-nuc-14-pro/techspec/
Even more interesting, ASRock Industrial is also offering NUCs again, which you can get as just a motherboard. These are similar to the ones from ASUS, but instead of having WiFi soldered on, they have an M.2 E-Key slot that is also PCIe x1 allowing plugging in another expansion card.
https://www.asrockind.com/en-gb/NUC-155H
Overall, these devices should provide an ideal basis for Unraid, as they will be very energy efficient and still offer good expandability. The ASRock board, for example, would allow 2x NVME SSDs and another ASM1166 SATA controller for a total of 7 SATA slots. Moreover, Meteor Lake finally also enables the encoding of AV1 videos.
I am excited for when these devices will hit the market