NUC6CAYH Product Change – Up-to-date Firmware Out of the Box

As you might remember, there was a serious flaw in the LSPCon firmware (Intel calls this as HDMI firmware sometimes) on the Apollo Lake and also Kaby Lake NUCs. This has been fixed since, but it requires a firmware update that can only be done using a Windows-only tool. This is bit problematic for the people who are running some other operating system already. For example, the Apollo Lake NUCs are very popular among the Linux HTPC crowd.

As per Intel’s Product Change Notification the future Apollo Lake NUCs will be shipped out of the factory with an up-to-date BIOS and HDMI firmware.

The product change notification document also gives you a hint on how to tell whether the box contains a NUC with an updated BIOS/firmware or not. You’ll just need to look for the ICASA logo on the label. If it is there, your NUC will have the newer HDMI firmware.

Of course, if you plan to use Windows on the NUC, this has very little significance as you can just download the HDMI firmware update from Intel’s Download Center and run through the update.

4 Responses

  1. alexsisk2017 says:

    I have Windows 10 Pro and LibreELEC 8.0.1 on my NUC6CAYH. I am using a Sony receiver with HDMI 1.4a [I know most of the HDMI issues were with HDMI 2.0], DTS-HD Master Audio and Dolby TrueHD decoders. My NUC has the LSPCon firmware update 1.66 installed. (I have to take my NUC to a friend’s house [HDMI 2.0] to update, so I haven’t done them all, but I’m up to date as of today.)

    I can bitstream without issue from Windows 10, but I don’t care to run Windows on a regular basis. On LibreELEC 8.0.1, I still get no audio when I try to bitstream and allow my receiver to handle decoding.

    As a result, I leave passthrough turned off, and have the receiver accept LPCM. While I’m fully aware that Kodi decodes these formats internally via FFMpeg, I simply never trust that I am getting a 100% authentic audio reproduction until the receiver says so.

    I own HDMI cables labeled “High Speed w/Ethernet” only. I obviously know how to turn passthrough on and off in Kodi, and use HDMI #0 SONY AMP bla bla bla as the audio output. It seems there’s nothing else that I can do.

  2. dCrypt says:

    Same here. There seems to be a problem at the driver level in Linux.

    https://nucblog.net/2017/01/apollo-lake-nuc-review-nuc6cayh-33-linux-htpc-conclusions/#comment-4987
    https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=98797

    I’ve not found a way to validate when is this fixed, but I’m afraid it’s still pending (Intel has to provide a fix)

  3. alexsisk2017 says:

    Is it really a concern for Intel at this point, though? The LSPCon firmware updates [currently at v1.66] have resolved the issue in Windows. That takes care of a large portion of their customers.

    Granted, this is a case where Intel is the hardware manufacturer for the entire computer. They should care more about other OS communities since the NUC is their product – but now that the hardware’s firmware is “fixed”, might it be Linux that needs an update?

  4. Mr P A Eccleston says:

    hi, ive got myself a intel nuc7i5bnh and wondered if there was a similar way of telling if the hdmi firmware for the lspcon has been updated, i think from memory my nuc was produced in june 2017, so i got a good chance of it being up to date right?.

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