An unannounced Intel NUC with an Alder Lake-P processor with specs, photos, and benchmarks emerged online. According to Someone's Vest on ChipHell, the new NUC reportedly goes by the codenamed "Wall Street Canyon" but will retail under the Intel NUC Studio 12 Pro moniker. Unfortunately, Intel wants to eat the Apple Mac Studio's lunch. The leaked information is very detailed, with internal images and sys-info tool screenshots, but please take all leaks with a pinch of salt.
The purported new Intel NUC Studio 12 Pro images show that Wall Street Canyon follows the familiar NUC 4x4 form factor. From the outside, nothing much has changed. The source says that the rear ports are identical to the NUC 11. The front of the case's two USB ports have transitioned to USB 3.2 Gen2 (10 Gbps), and there is a handy audio I/O jack. First to launch will be the tall version of this 4x4 NUC, the one with the capacity for a 2.5-inch SATA drive inside.
While we are still outside the design, it is worth mentioning that the power adapter has also seen an upgrade. It is now longer than the NUC body, but Intel could probably do better with a GaN technology-based PSU.
Diving inside the Intel NUC Studio 12 Pro, the ChipHell source says that you can spec one of five Alder Lake processors: Core i7-1270P (12C/16T, Iris Xe 96 EUs) with vPro at the top end, the very similar vPro-less Core i7-1260P, two vPro Core i5-1250P, and Core i5-1240P options, and a Core i3-1220P. The lowest-end Core i3 is still a 10C/12T part but settles for Intel UHD graphics. All these chips have a processor base power of 28W but can eat up to 64W at maximum turbo power.
Alder Lake is well known for being Intel's first platform to support DDR5, but Intel isn't bothering with DDR5 for the NUC Studio 12 Pro. Instead, users get two DDR4 memory slots supporting up to DDR4 3200 C22 on Gear 2. Nearby you have the slot for the PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 SSD. Intel's AX211 WIFI6E wireless network card is pre-installed in an M.2 2230 slot. A ribbon cable from the motherboard snakes above to the top of the chassis, where you will add a 2.5-inch drive if you wish.
The leaker used an engineering sample (ES) chip, but this may indicate the performance progress moving to the newest NUC generation. In CPU-Z tests, the reviewer noted that the Core i7-1260P powered NUC tested was 25% faster in single-thread performance and twice as fast in multi-thread tests than the previous gen's best.
In Cinebench, the source's results showed the Intel NUC Studio 12 Pro with Core i7-1260P traded blows with the Intel Core i5-12400 desktop processor. Lastly, the integrated Iris Xe graphics are the same as the prior generation, so don't deliver any surprises.
Reflecting upon the new NUC Studio 12 experience and performance, Someone's Vest claimed that the performance hike was within expectation, but he was very pleasantly surprised by the noise performance. In addition, he promised a further investigation into the new cooling module, which made this design "greatly improved" concerning noise and minimized the fluctuation in noise characteristics.
We have coverage of the Intel NUC Extreme Dragon Canyon from earlier in the year if you want the most powerful Alder Lake NUC you can get. But for the compact workstation market, the NUC Studio 12 Pro could be a better fit, depending on your workflows. We will share more info on the new NUC Studio 12 Pro as and when it comes in, but from this leak, it looks imminent.
