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Intel Teases Skull Canyon Gaming NUC: Core i7, Iris Pro Graphics, Thunderbolt 3 (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: Intel first hinted at their upcoming Skull Canyon NUC small form factor PC at CES 2016 in January, but the company is now ready to give this slightly bigger, badder NUC its official debut. Skull Canyon manages to cram high-end Intel silicon within an enclosure that measures just 8.5" x 4.6" x 0.9" and has a volume of just 0.69 liters. Inside, there is a sixth generation Intel Core i7-6770HQ processor with 45W TDP and integrated Iris Pro Graphics 580 with on-board eDRAM. On the memory front, up to 32GB of 2133MHz DDR4 is supported, while storage duties are covered by two M.2 slots that support the latest NVMe PCIe SSDs. Also on-board is Intel 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.2, and GbE and even a consumer infrared sensor if you want to use Skull Canyon as a media box. For external ports you'll find a full-size HDMI 2.0 port, Mini DisplayPort 1.2, four USB 3.0 ports, an SD slot which can accommodate up to 512GB, and support for Thunderbolt 3 (40GBps) and USB 3.1 using a USB Type-C connector. Intel says that a barebones Skull Canyon NUC (NUC6i7KYK) has an estimated street price of $650. Preorders for the NUC6i7KYK SKU will begin next month and shipments will commence in May.
order in the next 10 minutes and they'll send you two NUCs, just pay an additional $2000 S&H. Operators are standing by, call now !
Nullius in verba
I might buy it if it can run Kings Quest IV at max graphics.
Gaming and Intel Iris Pro don't go hand to hand, as much as Intel want it to happen, it won't. Sorry :c
Overpowered for a media player, weak GPU for a gaming box - I don't see where this fits in.
"Intel ME, because your processor can't get stitches for snitching on you."
I would rather have this than some walled garden xbox or playstation.
While the addition of a Razer Core helps overcome some of the drawbacks of the system, I would think that a laptop like the Stealth is a better solution as it gives the owner more portability. This report also suggests that other devices can be used with a Core which is what I would want.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I am glad to see they keep pushing the boundaries for small form factor computers. Just wish they do something about all these damn cables!!! E.g. Are we ever going to get combined power and data?
:T:R:A:N:S:
That's a pretty small form factor.
Sound more like Fire Canyon to me.
"and support for Thunderbolt 3 (40GBps)"
you mean 40Gbps, unfortunately
I just got all the parts to built a desktop mATX rig with dual NVMe SSDs (on on board, the other via PCI-E adapter). I was only going to use it for development anyway, and this would have provided that for about the same price, maybe even a little less, at a much better form factor (I was going to go itx but dual M.2s weren't really available without giving up the only PCI-E slot).
Oh well. Maybe I'll pick one up used after a year when they're down to like $700 loaded.
Laptops would be great as living-room/under-the-hdtv devices, if only there were some way to actually turn them on without lifting up the superfluous screen.
Next Unit of Computing (NUC) is a small-form-factor (SFF) personal computer (PC) designed by Intel.
so intel released a machine for an obscure proprietary form factor. color me unimpressed.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I've got some NUCs sitting around. There's one behind my TV at home and we use them in my office for presentation systems and the like. They range from Celerons to i5s (mostly i3s) and they're all Haswell or newer, with the latest having M.2 for storage.
So here's what I want to say: NUCs get hot. M.2 SSDs also get hot. There's almost nothing that can be done inside the NUC enclosure to cool the damned things down. You can point a box fan at one or put it on a large block of aluminum and it's not going to have much impact for the internal temperatures. Almost every NUC does a certain amount of thermal throttling, so there seems to be very little difference between an i3 and an i5. Putting an i7 in the same space with the same basic cooling options really isn't going to help.
All the arguments that apply to trying to claim that a "gaming" laptop with a high end CPU and no discrete GPU are also going to apply in this case. I understand that Thunderbolt in theory brings some options to the table in that regard but in practice I'd rather have an Expresscard given how limited (and expensive) support for Thunderbolt is on Windows and how well I know external Expresscard PCIe bridges work.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
This might be great for a music workstation. If the Thunderbird port can support low latency audio interfaces like the Focusrite Clarett series you could have a really nice compact set up that would be workable for performance or studio use.
I have a NUC, a nice little 4x4x2 form factor running linux. Great little thing takes up no space on my desktop. This new one is twice as wide. Too bad they couldn't keep the current size...
WOL?
I've looked at NUCs a few times now for various situations and every time I've been turned off by the requirement for 19V PSU. Not 12V not 24V, but 19V. Nice and non-standard, and exceptionally non-standard in situations where you may need a tiny computer (i.e. not somewhere where a wall socket is available).
Intel needs to make a NUC with dual Intel NICs for use pfsense users.
Google suggests:
Neutral Unit of Construction (airfare)
Network Unlock Code (cell phones)
Nailed-Up Connection (Nortel)
No Use Crying
I am guessing that something like Doom3 (which is now nearly 12 years old and was so cutting-edge that very few video cards could play it at highest rez when it came out) would play just fine on this?
Because this is how I would define minimal requirements for a 'gaming computer'
Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of these!
âoeWe have improved graphics 30 times what they were five years ago,â Bryant said [...]
for all their assertions that,
"Iris and Iris Pro, can outperform 80 percent of discrete graphics chips,"
their GPU's still aren't achieving even half the GFLOPS of my nearly 5 year old GTX 670. These chips might be fine for the 80% of total "PC game players" which, depending on how you choose to define that class, includes people playing Facebook games or other similar low-end titles. These things are not, however, remotely sufficient for any true PC gamer, as even my above-mentioned 670 with 2GB of dedicated memory, is starting to get a bit long in the tooth, and I'm finally having to start turning some settings down to medium on newly released games. There's simply no way you're getting acceptable performance from modern, AA or AAA class games on these Iris chips, and Intel is just blowing hot air to claim that they are a substitute for a discrete GPU PC gaming.
"Inveniemus Viam Aut Faciemus" 'We will find a way... Or we will make one!' --Hannibal of Carthage
The previous generation of high end Iris Pro graphics (The 6200 seen in some HTPC-oriented Broadwell parts) had very good performance for price. It matched or beat the performance of the Nvidia 940M in numerous real-world and synthetic tests. It even turned in decent performance in GPGPU tests. For a laptop or a small form factor living room PC, the Iris Pro can't be beat at the moment.
If in the market for an i7 machines, I might as well go for their $400 six-core offering. The base six-core is only $50 more than an unlocked four-core (or $100 more than base i7).
I know this uses a mobile i7, but I bought a quad-core i7 laptop for $650. It has most of those features, but comes with a screen and OS. Only downside is the integrated graphics. (Maybe someone will make a USB 3.0 GPU with 8x AA. It has two USB 3.0 slots so it could use both of them.)
I recently upgraded my desktop to a Brix PRO and it's working great as my main computer. It has an i7-4770r which is quite a lot faster than the former NUC lineup's i*-5xxxu. I think these tiny form-factor computers are the future and I'm glad to see intel putting out something more powerful in the NUC line.
The biggest issue is of course heat, and I wouldn't mind a more beefed up cooling system. But I think we've already crossed the threshold where you can have an excellent desktop within the bounds of how much heat the tiny box can handle. I run two VMs along side normal desktop usage like web surfing, and had to use the "cpulimit" command to slightly slow down both of the vmware processes. I don't have a side by side comparison to prove this, but I'm fairly confident that my faster machine plus slight cpulimit throttling is still a faster overall experience than just having an underpowered machine like the original NUCs.
So I'm liking the Brix PRO despite the fact that you can't actually max it out without producing too much heat. The tiny boxes are already good enough to use as an ordinary desktop, and it should only get better from here as technology keeps improving.
Why buy this i7 NuC when you can get ARM for half the price. Or, AMD for half the price. The i7 NuC tiny form factor doesn't do much for me. This NEW product from Intel is worth $99 dollars.
Don't forget the summer heat that will make your i7 NuC crawl like a snail.
Intel's CPU is also known to mis-calculate... Not good for Math Majors/NSA/NASA/DARPA.
If you really need to do Math Calculations it's best to go with ARM, AMD, and IBM's POWER CPU.
The Mac mini G4 had an external power supply. And big or not, it's easy to mount a power supply underneath your desk.