Intel's NUC 12 Extreme, the incoming (and potentially powerful) mini PC codenamed "Serpent Canyon" and featuring the company's own Arc graphics cards, has been listed in various incarnations at an online retailer.
You may recall that a month ago we were treated to spec leaks about the multiple configurations the NUC 12 box of cheats is expected to appear in, and those rumors appear to be about the money, assuming the product listings that have appeared are ' It is not false
As highlighted by VideoCardz (opens in a new tab) (and originally reported by @momomo_us (opens in a new tab) on Twitter), US retailer Provantage (opens in a new tab) has the NUC 12 Extreme in three versions main, as leaked before. There's a top-end unit with the Arc A770M GPU along with 16GB of system RAM and a Core i7 Alder Lake CPU, with a plus 730GB Arc A12M version (which also has a Core i7 CPU), the third variant with the minor Arc A550M graphics. card and 8 GB of system RAM (with a Core i5 chip).
As you may know, the current NUC 11 gaming models use Nvidia graphics cards, so it's a big change for Intel to be able to switch to its own GPUs (although it actually works in practice, well, we'll get back to that in a bit).
Pricing is set at €1040 (around €850, AU$1490) for the base model NUC 12, rising to €1310 (around €1080, AU$1880) for the flagship machine.
Analysis: A good sign, or should we put caution first here?
As for the price, it is too early to judge. At this point, the provided price tags could easily be placeholders, so for now they can be considered a useful ballpark, but nothing more.
Although no stock is available yet, the NUC 12 models listed on Provantage now suggest that the retailer hopes to have products on sale sooner rather than later. Basically, we can see that the inventory arrives in weeks (instead of months).
So are these retail listings popping up now a promising sign for those who want to get their hands on a NUC 12 as a compact PC that can deliver a decent gaming demo considering these discrete graphics cards? Well, after all, who knows: it wouldn't be the first time retailers have taken the plunge and released item listings too soon.
Also, doubts still hang like dark clouds about the performance of Arc GPUs and their drivers so far. And Arc Alchemist's desktop release has been seriously delayed, and it's a very strange affair, with GPUs only available in China so far.
Indeed, we've recently heard some pretty disturbing things about Arc desktop graphics cards having serious hardware flaws, which Intel denies, but it's clear there are gremlins in the works somewhere for launch. hasta ahora. Los primeros conductores that urgently need refinamiento parecen ser la cause de los problems más obvious en este momento, por lo que esperamos ver algunas mejoras en esa área.
In short, the NUC lag is naturally related to the Arc lag, and as it stands, we're not quite sure next-gen mini PCs will be on sale any time soon. However, we could be wrong in this speculation, and we hope it is true, not only for "Serpent Canyon" NUCs, but also for the wider availability of some affordable Arc discrete GPUs.
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