80 PCWorld JUNE 2022FEATURE DEEP INSIDE INTEL’S NUC
This led to Hades Canyon. A successor
to Skull Canyon, which featured Intel Iris Pro
graphics, it packed a quad-core processor
and up to 24 Radeon Vega compute units
and delivered performance similar to a
gaming laptop with GTX 1060 graphics
(fave.co/382YWbO). It didn’t look like
prior NUCs, with its thicker and wider
chassis and a glowing skull on the lid, but it
still measured less than 9 inches wide and 6
inches deep. That’s smaller than Nintendo’s
Wii U game console.
I purchased a Hades Canyon NUC and use
it to play PC games on my TV, a task that suits it
well. But Hades Canyon—as well as its
successor, Phantom Canyon—are also popular
with a very specific enterprise customer.
“We’ve seen some interesting usages for
it, from an internet cafe perspective, and even
an eSports hotel perspective,” said Habib.
“That concept is driving some of these
products, because they love the fact you can
put it in a hotel room and game in a small
space.” The Hades and Phantom Canyon
NUCs also proved popular with those who
need a small PC capable of driving numerous
high-resolution displays.
Hades Canyon opened the door to a new
generation of larger, more capable NUCs.
Powerhouses like the most recent Dragon
Canyon (fave.co/38BkEnu), which can deliver
up to a Core i7-12900, are meant to turn
heads—but they’re not the only reason NUC
has remained relevant for a decade.NUC’S SECRET SUCCESS
The NUC group’s success is unusual. Tech
giants like Intel are notorious for spinning up
wild ideas that die after a few years.
Remember Intel OnCue? Or its 5G modem
business (fave.co/3lqShLr)? What about the
company’s SSDs (fave.co/3MtIwZ5)?
PC fans might peg the NUC’s success on
its flashy enthusiast projects, but it’s enterprise
and business-to-business clients, not gamers
and content creators, that drive the bulk of
NUC’s advancements. Developers,
researchers, and academics are among
NUC’s most dedicated fans. A NUC might be
less powerful than a full-size desktop but, for
many, performance is not the sole concern.
“There was a guy I worked with who I still
keep in contact with, and he was infamous for
being the guy with 26 NUCs on his desk,”
said McCarson. “This wasn’t a requirement,
he wasn’t asked to do that. It was just that
they’re so small, so compact, so efficient, so
easy to plug in.”
A NUC is small, sips power, generates
little noise or heat, and is relatively
inexpensive, all of which means developers
can deploy NUCs as single-purpose
machines. This approach eliminates a central
point of failure and lets developers side-step
changes to system software or hardware that
might impact a workstation handling
numerous projects at once.
The NUC group is serious about reliability
and efficiency. During a tour of the group’s