Rumored Intel Phantom Canyon NUC Leaks With 10nm Tiger Lake-U And PCIe 4.0
Last week, we brought you news of an alleged new Xeon-based NUC coming from Intel that is being developed under the codename Quartz Canyon. This would be the first in Intel's long line of NUC small form-factor PCs to feature a Xeon-class processor. Now we're learning of another new NUC in the pipeline, and it's called Phantom Canyon.
Phantom Canyon will reportedly be powered by Intel's upcoming Tiger Lake processor architecture (4 cores, 8 threads), which is a 10nm+ successor to the Ice Lake processor that are just now rolling out of the gate. Tiger Lake will again have a new CPU architecture, and more importantly, it will feature Intel's new Xe graphics core.
While Tiger Lake will no doubt have the most potent graphics engine ever seen in an Intel CPU, we're still only looking at around 2 TFLOPs of compute performance according to previous reports. That's why enthusiasts will be glad to know that Intel will offer Phantom Canon with both NVIDIA GTX 10 Series and RTX 20 Series discrete graphics cards.
According to the leak, Phantom Canyon will use 28-watt versions of Tiger Lake-U. In addition to natively supporting Thunderbolt 3, which is to be expected, Tiger Lake CPUs will also support PCIe 4.0.
If you recall, AMD was the first out of the gate with PCIe 4.0 support with its Zen 2-based Ryzen 3000 desktop processors. At this point, the only consumer-based hardware that support PCIe 4.0 are AMD X570 motherboards, AMD Radeon RX 5700 graphics cards, and a handful of PCIe 4.0 SSDs that offer read speeds topping 5GB/sec. Other items note include support for HDMI 2.0, DisplayPort 1.4, Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.0, USB-C 3.1 Gen 2 and up to 64GB of DDR4 memory via two DIMM slots.
At this time, we'll have to take this information with a grain of salt but it seems highly plausible given what we know about Intel's processor roadmap.
