Intel Cannon Lake-based NUC with discrete Radeon GPU coming soon

Intel’s long overdue 10nm Cannon Lake CPU’s look to be edging closer to release if a leaked Intel NUC unit is anything to go by. The NUC in question also features a discrete GPU, suggesting that it could also offer some reasonable gaming chops. It might not be quite up there with the incoming Hades Canyon NUC, which is powered by AMD’s Vega graphics, but it looks like it will serve up some solid performance for older 3D titles.

The NUC in question is fitted with a Core i3-8121U dual-core Cannon Lake-U processor. Part of the 8th-generation Intel Core series family, the Cannon Lake chips are a 10nm die-shrink of Intel’s Kaby Lake microarchitecture. What sets this NUC apart from even the Hades Canyon NUC is that it is the first to ship with a discrete GPU, in this instance an Radeon 550 mobile GPU fitted with 2 GB of GDDR5 VRAM.

Twitter user @TUM APISAK managed to run some benchmarks of the NUC8i3CYB, which reveals that it is clocked at 2.2GHz and is fitted with 8 GB of RAM. In terms of its graphics performance in 3DMark, it roughly aligns with the performance of a gaming notebook from circa 2013, which isn’t too bad considering its compact form factor. The NUC8i3CYB is also expected to be joined by at least one other variant, the NUC8I3CYSM3. Both are said to have turned up on online retail stores in listings, but with scant additional info.

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