Intel Phantom Canyon leak hints at when we may see the rumored NUC

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And lends weight to previous speculation on the mini PC’s specs

(Image credit: Future)

Intel’s roadmap for future NUC boxes has been spilled online, lending weight to some previously rumored devices and hardware specs, and giving us an idea of release timeframes.

Assuming this leak, which comes from Fanless Tech, is genuine, it again shows us that Intel’s NUC 11 devices – Phantom Canyon and Panther Canyon, representing ‘extreme’ and ‘performance’ models respectively – will use 11th-gen Tiger Lake-U (10nm++) processors.

For the uninitiated, NUC stands for Next Unit of Computing, which is essentially Intel’s fancy name for a very compact PC.

The rumor mill previously insisted that these devices – which still aren’t officially confirmed, of course – might arrive in the second half of 2020, and indeed the roadmap indicates this could be the case.

However, the roadmap was made before the outbreak of coronavirus, Fanless Tech’s source noted, and that incident could delay production and shipment of the alleged NUCs.

Walk like a panther

Panther Canyon will purportedly offer the full range of 11th-gen CPUs – Core i3, i5 and i7 – whereas Phantom Canyon will be restricted to the latter two, with no Core i3 offering (unsurprisingly given its ‘extreme’ categorization).

Phantom Canyon will offer the ability to add a third-party discrete GPU, with the volume of the box coming in at 1.35 liters, whereas Panther Canyon will run with Intel Gen12 integrated graphics and a size of either 0.5 or 0.7 liters.

Other notable specs which have been previously rumored include support for Wi-Fi 6, Intel Optane Memory, and PCIe 4.0 support for that discrete GPU in the Phantom Canyon NUC (Panther Canyon will apparently offer a PCIe 4.0 slot for an SSD, because as mentioned, that doesn’t cater for a separate graphics card).

System memory will reportedly be specified at up to 64GB with dual-channel DDR4-3200 SODIMMs.

As to the discrete graphics you might be able to cram into a Phantom Canyon box, Fanless Tech has previously speculated that GPUs with 6GB or 8GB of video RAM are in the (graphics) cards, and we’ve heard that the compact device could pack in an RTX 2060. It’s also expected to have some kind of custom vapor chamber to help cool those components.

Via Tom’s Hardware

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Darren Allan

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).