A new leak allegedly lays bare Intel’s NUC plans and coughs up some surprising news that appears to run contrary to rumors we’ve heard to date.
According to a new road map shared by known Twitter leaker @momomo_us, Intel is gearing up to release the NUC 11 Extreme ‘Hades Follow On,’ presumed to be Phantom Canyon.
It will reportedly feature one of Intel’s upcoming 10nm+ Tiger Lake-U CPUs alongside an NVIDIA GeForce GPU. Recent benchmark leaks point to an 11th-gen Core i5 CPU alongside an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti GPU.
Notwithstanding potential delays thrown up by the coronavirus pandemic, we could see the new NUC land in the last few months of 2020 or early 2021.
Alongside Phantom Canyon, the roadmap suggests that Intel will focus its efforts on the NUC 9 Extreme Ghost Canyon in 2020 and into 2021.
Putting into question the authenticity of the leak is the glaring absence of Intel’s NUC 11 Performance Panther Canyon, which rumors suggest will be a smaller profile mid-budget build without a dedicated GPU aimed at mainstream consumers, as opposed to the enthusiast-geared Phantom Canyon. Both were expected to launch in tandem.
This could mean Intel has stealthily axed plans for the Panther Canyon to accompany Phantom Canyon, or the leak isn’t quite as genuine as it first appears.
As such, we recommend approaching all this with a degree of caution. We may be looking at a bogus roadmap courtesy of an enterprising troll out to trick us, or an outdated roadmap that has since been updated to show that Phanter Canyon is indeed part of Intel’s NUC plans.
We’d suggest passing judgment before we hear more about Intel’s firm NUC plans and whether it has indeed shelved Panther Canyon or not.