Rumor | Intel NUC gaming Ghost Canyon and Phantom Canyon on schedule for 2020-2021 launch according to new leak

Intel launched its 2018 Hades Canyon NUC early last year to replace the 2017 Skull Canyon. Unlike the Iris-powered 2017 model, Hades Canyon sports a unique Intel-AMD Kaby Lake-G CPU with a TDP of up to 100 W for significantly better gaming performance.

With Kaby Lake-G winding down, however, Intel has been quiet on the eventual Hades Canyon successor. The latest rumors from Chiphell are claiming that Ghost Canyon will launch in 2019-2020 to supplant Hades Canyon with Phanton Canyon following shortly thereafter in 2020-2021. Leaked screenshots reveal that these systems will be unlikely to support Kaby Lake-G and will instead ship with more traditional Intel CPUs. Ghost Canyon and Phantom Canyon are expected to come with the unlocked 45 W Core i9-9980HK and a yet-to-be-named 28 W Tiger Lake-U CPU, respectively.

The new rumors line up with older Ghost Canyon rumors a few months ago that also claimed Nvidia GPUs in lieu of Radeon. Options will probably be the discrete GTX 1660 Ti to RTX 2060 range which would be a healthy boost over the RX Vega M GH in the Core i7-8809G. We suspect that NUCs in the farther future will use Intel GPUs to be a "full Intel" gaming product.

Meanwhile, the consumer-oriented Frost Canyon and workstation-oriented Quartz Canyon NUCs are expected to offer 25 W Comet Lake-U and 45 W Coffee Lake-H Core i7-9750H or Xeon E-2286M CPUs, respectively. The Frost Canyon NUC will supposedly continue the familiar 4x4 Intel NUC form factor while Quartz Canyon may introduce a completely new design in order to house a PCIe slot for a dedicated graphics card.