You can, it just wouldn't be profitable. For example an s19 has about 230 asic chips. It probably wouldn't be difficult to stick 20 or so into a nuc form factor divice
Discussion
noob question by why does it scale so much better with more chips
All the other components are essentially fixed cost, so you want to spread out their cost over as many asic chips as you can reasonably cool. While the individual chip efficiency would be the same, the efficiency of the whole device (cost/hash rate) for a nuc form factor would be way lower
hmm interesting if that’s it, im surprised small home miners aren’t a thing in that case like how common pi nodes are among bitcoiners.
every home miner i see goes for the S19 and has to rewire part of their house even just to mine as a novelty.
Yeah, personally I'd buy a thumb drive form factor usb miner with a single current gen asic chip on it just for fun if it was available for a huge mark up