This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

Intel NUC

Earlier this week, Intel confirmed it would piece of work with AMD to develop a new GPU for use in its NUC (Next Unit of Calculating) systems. The news sent waves through the tech community, both because it had been previously rumored (and specifically denied), by Intel and because information technology's the first such collaborative product effort between AMD and Intel in… well, basically e'er. The two companies may work together in joint efforts to write standards or as members of other tech organizations, but they oasis't jointly announced collaborative products in decades.

Thanks to an earlier leaked roadmap and an image from Chiphell, we can at present start putting things together on what the new NUC will look like and be capable of. First, here's the leaked photograph from Chiphell:

HadesCanyon

A few thoughts, in no particular order: The CPU is going to be the top left block (the night patch could exist burn damage), while the GPU and a unmarried stack of HBM2 is at the other finish of the packet. What kind of performance can we expect from that kind of configuration?

sk_hynix_hbm2_implementationsThis slide is a few years old, simply it illustrates the HBM2 product stack fairly well. HBM2 supports up to 8GB of memory per stack, at capacities ranging from 2-8GB and 128GB/s – 256GB/southward of bandwidth per stack. A comparable dual-channel APU or Intel on-die GPU using DDR4-3200 would offer 51.2GB/s of memory bandwidth per stack, which means this new GPU will decisively outpace the old–the only question is by how much.

According to an earlier leaked roadmap courtesy of PC Perspective, Intel is planning 3 carve up Hades Canyon SKUs with a 46W, 66W, and 96W TDP:

HadesCanyon

One of the two Hades Coulee devices shown on the left roadmap is labeled every bit "Hades Canyon VR," but the three potential SKUs on the right only differ in their TDPs. If we assume that the 1 labeled bit is the already-launched Cadre i7-6770HQ, that leaves a 66W TDP and a 96W TDP still to populate, and the divergence is likely to come downwardly to the GPU. And a GPU in a 96W combined form factor may well exist capable of at least basic VR, though we'll have to see how performance looks to determine that.

It's not hard to come across how this would play. Intel can offer different Vega configurations to striking unlike performance targets by adjusting the GPU and HBM clock speeds. It's been several years since nosotros've speculated on how HBM2 could evangelize the APU performance AMD has long promised–I admit, when we started roofing the topic we didn't recall it would arrive in an Intel SKU, but this program should yield dividends for both companies.

*No images of Hades Canyon have all the same been fabricated bachelor; our feature image is an earlier model.