Intel's Phantom Canyon NUC which would be powered by next-generation Tiger Lake CPUs has leaked out over at Chiphell Forums (via Momomo_Us). From the looks of it, the Phantom Canyon NUC lineup would consist of at least two variants, each supporting a select line of processors.
Intel Phantom Canyon NUC With Tiger Lake CPUs and Discrete GPUs Arrives in 2021
From the looks of it, Phantom Canyon NUCs be coming with 28W Tiger Lake-U. Starting with the specifications, we are looking at Intel Tiger Lake-U processors with a 28W package. The Tiger Lake generation of processors comes after Intel's 10nm Ice Lake generation. Tiger Lake CPUs would be using a more advanced 10nm+ process node and improved architecture design.
While Willow Cove cores used on the Tiger Lake CPUs would have all the underlying technologies featured on Sunny Cove based processors, they would also feature cache redesigns, transistor optimizations and enhanced security features to deliver much better performance and clocks than 10nm processors.
Tiger Lake generation of processors would also feature support for PCIe Gen 4, something that is already being offered on AMD's mainstream Ryzen 3000 processors. The Phantom Canyon NUCs would offer a PCIe Gen 4 x4 interface for Gen 4 based SSDs. In addition to that, we are looking at discrete GPUs which fall in the same tier as the GTX 1660 Ti and RTX 2060. The slides might make it look like that these are the specific models we should expect in Phantom Canyon NUCs but Intel would instead opt for whatever's similar to these currently mainstream parts. Power consumption is the main factor to consider so we should expect the same power tier for GPUs as these discrete options.
Intel would also add HDMI 2.0 and dual DP 1.4 ports on their NUCs. Aside from that, we can expect Thunderbolt 3 (Type-C) ports, 2x SODIMMs with support for up to 64 GB of DDR4 memory. 64 GB memory would be supported with speeds of 2400 MHz while 32 GB of memory would allow for higher 2666 MHz support. There would also be dual M.2 slots (Gen 4), 2.5G and Gigabit Ethernet LAN, WiFi-6 + Bluetooth 5.0, multiple USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports, a custom vapor chamber for cooling and customizable RGB lighting.
The size of the NUC is considerably bigger than the current ones but not as big as the 5-liter variants we have seen for the Quartz and Ghost Canyon NUCs. Intel has suggested a 100W bump in power input of 330W, up from 230W on Hades Canyon which featured 100W processors. We should definitely hear something about the new NUCs around CES 2020.
