Pre-Orders Available On 10nm Intel NUCs With Discrete AMD GPUs

Don’t get too excited over the headline, but 10nm chips from Intel are going up for pre-order through an enterprise retailer called SimplyNUC that deals in specialized Small Form Factor (SFF) PCs. The NUC8i3CYSM and NUC8i3CYSN going up for pre-order are the first NUCs to come with AMD discrete graphics chips in the form of Radeon 540 GPUs, which are different from the Hades Canyon NUCs we’ve previously seen.

The two NUCs are part of Intel’s Crimson Canyon line of NUCs, and are definite odd-balls as far as Intel’s current lineup goes. The CPU in question that’s to be used is a Core i3-8121U running at 2.2-3.2GHz, a member of the Canon Lake family, made using Intel’s 10nm process. The pre-order documents don’t explicitly state this CPU is used directly, but the main product page does.

What makes this CPU so odd? Intel’s slow release of 10nm products is well documented by now, with most estimates putting the desktop chips being released sometime in 2019, a full 3 years late. So to see something come out early is somewhat surprising. The oddity comes into play when you check Intel’s spec sheet on these CPUs – dual core, 15W TDP chips with no iGPU. That Radeon 540 GPU isn’t there as a means to boost Intel’s somewhat underwhelming GPU performances, it’s there out of necessity.

This is different from what we saw with the Hades Canyon NUCs previously released. Those were MCMs (multi chip module) with the CPU, GPU, and HBM memory on a single package, the GPU being an RX Vega M. These Crimson Canyon NUCs have the Radeon 540 as a separate chip with its own memory, 2GB of GDDR5. The GPU has 512 SPs built around the Polaris architecture, so not the most powerful GPUs going, but are a lot more capable than the Intel UHD 620 featured in Intel’s lower-end CPUs.

The next issue with these 10nm CPUs requires a bit of digging around, as it relates to the TDP of the chip. Intel has quite an extensive array of CPUs in the same 15W TPD envelope, and what’s surprising is that a 14nm i3-8130U is not only faster at 3.4GHz, but includes an iGPU as well. The only real perk in the favor of the Cannon lake CPU is the inclusion of AVX-512 support. Some more depth is available over at Anandtech.

SimplyNUC is selling these crimson Canyon NUCs as complete units with storage and memory included. The higher end model features 8GB of RAM and a 1TB HDD for $574. You can add an M.2 NVMe SSD if you wish, like any other NUC, as it’s a full height model. Release is expected mid September, with other models being released in October.