Details of Intel NUCs with AMD Radeon 540 GPU appear online

The specifications and dollar prices of two upcoming compact Intel NUCs with Radeon GPU have appeared online. The systems include a Core i3-8121U and an AMD Radeon 540 GPU. They are the first NUCs with separate Radeon GPUs.

The new Intel NUCs with type numbers NUC8i3CYSM and NUC8i3CYSN can be found at the webshop SimplyNUC. These are the systems about which information appeared in April, under the name Crimson Canyon. It is not about the first NUCs with Radeon GPU. That was the Hades Canyon-NUC with Kaby Lake-G processor, but it was an RX Vega M GH GPU placed on the package, while the new systems are separate GPUs. The AMD Radeon 540 has 8 compute units and can have 2GB gddr5. This makes the video chip a lot slower than Hades Canyon’s RX Vega, which combines 24 compute units with 4GB of hbm2.

The processor is the Core i3-8121U, one of the first 10nm chips from Intel, which itself does not have a GPU. The processor has a clock speed of 2.2GHz with a maximum boost to 3.2GHz and a TDP of 15W. The NUC8i3CYSM has 8GB lpddr4-2666 ram and the NUC8i3CYSN has to make do with 4GB. In both cases, the RAM is soldered to the motherboard and cannot be expanded.

Furthermore, both systems have a 1TB hard drive with Windows 10 on it. It is not yet known whether models without a hard drive and operating system will be released. The NUCs also have a PCI-e slot for M2 SSDs, two HDMI 2.0a ports, four USB 3.0 interfaces, support for Gigabit Ethernet and WiFi-AC, infrared and an SD card reader.

The suggested retail prices of the NUC8i3CYSM and NUC8i3CYSN are $575 and $530 respectively. First mentioned is expected to be released in September; the version with 4GB ram will follow a month later.