Hades Canyon NUC to Feature AMD Graphics

Early this week Intel announced that it is collaborating with AMD to produce a multi-chip module (MCM) that will include a Kaby Lake-H CPU and an AMD Vega GPU together with 2nd generation high bandwidth memory (HBM2). These news combined with a picture from Chip Hell website that appears to show a board that could be the upcoming Hades Canyon NUC and the leaked benchmarks of i7-8705G and i7-8809G give us some ideas of what the Hades Canyon NUC could be.

As you might remember, in September we reported that the Hades Canyon NUC will come in 2 variants: a 65-watt version and a 100-watt version. The benchmark results seen indicate that these 2 variants could be powered by i7-8705G and i7-8809G respectively. It also could be that the difference between these two units is mainly the GPU. Both of the quad-core CPUs appear to have 3.1 GHz base clock frequency and 4.1 GHz boost frequency.

The board in the photo seems to match the rumors from September pretty well. Connectivity is quite impressive: 2x LAN, 2x Thunderbolt 3, 2x HDMI 2.0a. In addition to the m.2 NVMe slot two SATA connectors are provided. The board certainly is a bit bigger than the traditional NUC mainboard and it remains to be seen what kind of enclosure and cooling system Intel will build around this. Note that Intel calls the graphics here as dGFX but we can certainly debate how discrete the graphics here are. From end users perspective it could be seen as integrated AMD GPU…

The performance will be much better than the Skull Canyon NUC as the leaked benchmarks look rather impressive. Just how small will the case be and how to keep it cool without making the NUC sound like a jet engine at take-off? We’ll find out next year as it’s predicted to be available Q2 2018.

7 Responses

  1. kix says:

    looks like there are separate power for cpu(top) and gpu/hbm(left)
    hope they will finally make good cooling for this.

  2. sessho says:

    Hope for a badass design too like the skull canyon !

  3. BdHN says:

    The case top of the 100-watt version is engineered to make waffles ?

  4. Sam says:

    Not into playing games on NUC. My wishlist is more memory, more cores and quieter fan.

  5. Waynebo says:

    Oh,well! So much for running secure Linux builds on them.

  6. Charles Abdouch says:

    It is clear from the picture that this is a Mini-STX motherboard and not the motherboard going into Hades Canyon which would be a dedicated design.

    • Olli says:

      Thanks for the comment Charles. But yeah, you’re right, this could be a development board or even a product from some other company than Intel.

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