It appears that Intel had a fair bit to show off during its Investor Meeting earlier in the week. Aside from its aspirations to become a major GPU player in 2024, the chipmaker also showed off its latest NUC Extreme, codenamed Beast Canyon.
Now, we say new but it should be noted that the NUC Extreme seen here is a NUC 11, meaning that the system’s core CPU is based on Intel’s 11th generation Tiger Lake architecture, and is not to be confused with the NUC 12 Extreme, codenamed “Dragon Canyon. That was announced back during CES 2022.
The main takeaway here, however, is that the GPU powering the small form factor system is an ARC Alchemist GPU. As a proof of concept, it was also shown running what is believed to be Shadow of the Tomb Raider, along with Intel’s own XeSS resolution upscaling technology.
Arc Beast Canyon Lara Croft XeSS pic.twitter.com/PesBjcW83S
— Raja Koduri (@RajaXg) February 17, 2022
Specs-wise, the NUC 11 Extreme offers either a Core i9-11900KB or a Core i7-11700B, depending on your taste. More importantly, the Tiger Lake architecture also affords users access to all 16 lanes of PCIe Gen4. In the case of the ARC Alchemist demo, it isn’t clear what sort of GPU was being used, although based on initial images of the casing, gamers should be able to comfortably fit an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 FE inside it.
Last but not least, Intel also confirmed during the Investor Meeting 2022 that ARC Alchemist GPUs will indeed be launching sometime within the second quarter of this year.
(Source: Twitter, Videocardz)
