Intel Preps Quartz Canyon NUC With Xeon E Chips

An Intel product brochure, hosted at IT provider Softline's Russian website, seemingly reveals the chipmaker's upcoming Quartz Canyon NUC (next unit of computing) that targets workstation users, content creators, CAD professionals and business users.

By the images alone, the Quartz Canyon looks bigger than the NUCs we're accustomed to, which makes sense, since it'll reportedly feature support for one discrete graphics card.

On the processor side, Intel will allegedly offer the Quartz Canyon with an octa-core Xeon E chip or 9th Generation Core i7 vPro chip. Although the listing didn't specify the processor's exact model, we can think of a few candidates that fit the description:

If we look at the Xeon E family first, there are five chips that come with eight cores and 16 threads. The Xeon E-2288G, which is rated with a 95W TDP (thermal design power), is the highest-end part. It comes with a 3.7 GHz base clock and 5 GHz boost clock. The Xeon E-2278G holds the second position with a 3.4 GHz base clock and 5 GHz boost clock. For comparison, on the mainstream side the i7-9700K, i7-9700 and i7-9700T are the only 9th-Generation Core i7 chips that come with eight cores. The i7-9700K is the fastest of the trio.

The Quartz Canyon NUC will support EEC (error-correcting code) DDR4 memory modules and Intel Optane drives. The device also has dual Thunderbolt and Ethernet ports, plus an Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX200 adapter onboard that provides a wireless connection to the Internet with a maximum speed of 2.4 Gbps. Quartz Canyon has a 500W internal power supply.

The leaked brochure doesn't mention when the Quartz Canyon NUC will be available. But since the document is dated April 24, we don't expect to see the NUC until perhaps the last quarter of 2019 or early 2020.