It was only recently that a user of Chinese tech giant Baidu reportedly revealed Intel’s latest NUC mini PC, and now new rumors have surfaced about its full specs. And from what we can see, these leaked specs show just how powerful these mini PCs will be compared to standard gaming PCs.
The NUC 12 Enthusiast, codenamed ‘Serpent Canyon’, is a continuation of the NUC 11 ‘Beast Canyon’ which will apparently use the 12th Gen Intel Alder Lake CPU and the latest Arc A7 series GPUs.
According to leaks from fanless technology (opens in new tab) and reported by Wccftech (opens in new tab)Serpent Canyon will come in three types.
All three will reportedly use Intel Arc laptop GPUs rather than The Nvidia GeForce GPUs that the NUC 11s were equipped with. The 16GB variant points to the Arc A770M, while the 12GB and 8GB will likely be the Arc A730M and Arc A550M.
The NUC 12 Extreme also surfaced in the rumor mill – which, unlike the Enthusiast, which supposedly uses discrete GPUs, is said to use full-length discrete graphics cards.
Analysis: Can Intel be competitive in the GPU market?
It makes sense for Intel to break free from the shackles of its competitor Nvidia and use its own internal GPU for the NUC 12, especially in China where budget GPUs are more prevalent due to the popularity of internet cafes.
However, considering the rocky benchmark performances for the Arc A7 and the high starting prices on desktop Arc A380, there seem to be problems with Intel’s debut. In fact, Intel’s high-end GPU benchmarks lag behind Nvidia’s RTX 3060 in early tests, which is even worse.
There is also the fact that Intel has limiting your release of desktop Arc GPUs for China, which is resulting in delays for the rest of the world. And looking at the reasoning behind this decision, it’s clear that Intel is simply not ready for Arc GPUs to be released elsewhere.
“All these issues cast a huge shadow over Intel’s success in the GPU market, so we’ll have to wait and see how well the tech giant does when it fully releases products that use its lineup of GPUs, like the NUC 12. in the near future.”