Intel Prepping Skull Canyon Enthusiast NUC

With the increasing relevance of mobile and smaller form factors, Intel has been focusing a lot of their attention on this segment. According to leaked internal documentation, Intel is readying a new enthusiast-oriented NUC or Next Unit of Computing. Dubbed Skull Canyon, the new system will feature a Skylake based CPU paired with a potent Iris Pro iGPU in the tiny form factor.

Set to arrive in Q1 2016, Skull Canyon is expected to be the fastest NUC Intel has ever made yet. With the top end Iris Pro 580 graphics (GT4), this little NUC will offer potent graphics capability that should surpass most HTPCs. The iGPU will feature 576 ALUs, in 72 EUs, in a total 9 subslices. Paired with 128MB of eDRAM, this should allow for performance near GTX 750 or R7 370 levels. You can read more about our analysis of Skylake’s new graphics architecture here.

Given our experience with past NUCs, this should be paired with a dual-core i7 U series processor with Turbo Boost and Hyper-Threading. This should give the iGPU plenty of juice to ramp up clock speeds. However, with the enthusiast label, Intel may push things further this time around and opt for a quad -core chip. Expect to pay for this level of performance though as NUC’s are not cheap, least of all an enthusiast one.