Leaked Intel Roadmap reveals NUCs beyond Tiger Lake-U

Intel’s leaked roadmap has given a lot of details about its schedule till the year 2021. The upcoming NUC will use 10nm based Tiger Lake-U processors that support discrete graphics cards. The higher-performing 8th gen Hades Canyon will be succeeded by Phantom Canyon (NUC 11 Extreme). We’ve seen one of these reported earlier.

Bigger-than-NUC Formfactor

Since it supports discrete graphics card, the casing will be larger than a typical NUC, but still maintaining smaller than mini ITX form factor.  The Hades Canyon’s casings are typically 1.2L, while the Tiger Lake U counterparts will be 1.35L. The chipmaking giant is going to release these NUC (Next Unit of Computing) before by Q4 2020 or Q1 2021. We’ve already seen leaks with GTX 1660 Ti GPU in it.

Along with it, the NUC 9 Extreme ‘Ghost Canyon’ will be released in 2021, most likely to be supporting discrete graphics card. The NUC 11 Performance (Panther Canyon) is supposedly a similar variation without the discrete graphics support, therefore smaller casing. However, there’s no mention of this in this roadmap.

Other NUC Variations

There are two professional workload-specific NUCs- the NUC 9 Pro called Quartz Canyon and the NUC 8 Pro Provo Canyon. The NUC 8 rugged will use 8th i5 vPro graphics under i5 and i3 SKUs with 15W TDP with modular chassis and mainboard. The NUC 8 Rugged will a Celeron 8W based NUC meant to be operated fanless, most likely for POS purposes. Then it lists the NUC 8 Essential and NUC 7 Essential using Pentium Silver and Celeron variations.

These roadmap slides only cover upcoming NUCs until 2021. Intel did say that it wants to not concentrate on benchmarks. Perhaps this is one of the products they meant. Of course, we’ll just have to see how good these units are. Even with smaller miniITX and SFX form factors, a small NUC powerful enough to drive a mid-end graphics card will be an attraction for the buyers.

Source: TechPowerUp!

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