Intel has presented us at this CES 2020 important news in different product families that we hope to see one day in the real market. On the one hand we have its new range of Xe graphics chips that enter in the market with the new Intel Tiger Lake processors manufactured in 10nm++. Also we have the new concept of NUC Element miniPC with modular design with the NUC Ghost Canyon model is also introduced.
Intel Tiger Lake
With the name of Intel Tiger Lake we have the first processors manufactured in 10nm++ that replace the Iris Pro Gen11 GPUs with the new Xe LP Gen 12 or DXG1 that represent a radical change in this aspect and from which a much higher performance is expected to compete with the Vega GPU of the AMD Ryzen Mobile. As we can see in the processor images we have two separate cores, one for the CPU and one for the GPU which reminds us of the design of the Intel Kaby Lake G with integrated GPU Radeon, without a doubt the acquisition of the top AMD engineer in GPU sector has his results.
At the CPU level we have the new Willow Cove cores that have support for the new LPDDR5 RAM, are compatible with the AVX-512 instruction sets and increase the L1 and L3 cache very considerably. For now, the unveiled processors are oriented to the laptops in their variants Tiger Lake-U low-power and Tiger Lake-Y slopes, and ultra-low-power, for now we have no news of desktop processors with this hardware.
As a novelty these processors also have PCI Express 4.0 support, native Thunderbolt 4 connection and Wi-Fi 6 support by default. Undoubtedly an interesting platform that for now takes its first steps in the sector of low consumption in laptops for the general public and then will be extended to desktop users, we will see the performance when the real units arrives.
Intel NUC Element
We had no news in the Intel NUC range for a long time and now we are announced the new modular concept NUC Compute Element, a rather peculiar solution that seeks a public willing to invest in a very compact platform. The design of these mini PCs presents a cartridge where we have the CPU, housing for RAM, two NVMe disk slots and USB and network connection ports.
The NUC Element is open to other manufacturers who have already shown their interest as Cooler master and Razer. From Intel we have the Intel NUC 9 Extreme base model also called Intel NUC Ghost Canyon that gives us an example of what we can achieve with this type of design.
On the other hand it is a product limited by the length of GPU, we have a power source in SFX format, the CPU fan is in blower format with its implications at the level of efficiency and noise. We will see what margin you have left to compete against a classic mini-ITX computer with standard components.
