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Intel NUC

Earlier this week, Intel confirmed information technology would work with AMD to develop a new GPU for use in its NUC (Adjacent Unit of Calculating) systems. The news sent waves through the tech community, both because it had been previously rumored (and specifically denied), past Intel and because it's the first such collaborative production effort between AMD and Intel in… well, basically ever. The 2 companies may work together in joint efforts to write standards or as members of other tech organizations, but they haven't jointly announced collaborative products in decades.

Thanks to an before leaked roadmap and an image from Chiphell, we can now outset putting things together on what the new NUC will wait like and be capable of. First, here'southward the leaked photo from Chiphell:

HadesCanyon

A few thoughts, in no particular society: The CPU is going to be the superlative left cake (the night patch could be burn down damage), while the GPU and a single stack of HBM2 is at the other terminate of the package. What kind of performance can nosotros expect from that kind of configuration?

sk_hynix_hbm2_implementationsThis slide is a few years sometime, but it illustrates the HBM2 product stack fairly well. HBM2 supports up to 8GB of retentivity per stack, at capacities ranging from two-8GB and 128GB/s – 256GB/s of bandwidth per stack. A comparable dual-channel APU or Intel on-dice GPU using DDR4-3200 would offer 51.2GB/s of memory bandwidth per stack, which means this new GPU will decisively outpace the former–the only question is by how much.

Co-ordinate to an before leaked roadmap courtesy of PC Perspective, Intel is planning three separate Hades Coulee SKUs with a 46W, 66W, and 96W TDP:

HadesCanyon

One of the ii Hades Canyon devices shown on the left roadmap is labeled as "Hades Canyon VR," only the three potential SKUs on the right only differ in their TDPs. If we assume that the ane labeled chip is the already-launched Core i7-6770HQ, that leaves a 66W TDP and a 96W TDP still to populate, and the departure is likely to come down to the GPU. And a GPU in a 96W combined form gene may well be capable of at least basic VR, though we'll take to see how functioning looks to determine that.

It's not hard to see how this would play. Intel can offering different Vega configurations to hit different performance targets past adjusting the GPU and HBM clock speeds. It's been several years since we've speculated on how HBM2 could deliver the APU performance AMD has long promised–I acknowledge, when we started roofing the topic we didn't think information technology would arrive in an Intel SKU, but this program should yield dividends for both companies.

*No images of Hades Coulee have yet been made bachelor; our feature image is an earlier model.