Intel NUC 13 Bravo Canyon Breaks Cover As A Rugged Fanless Alder Lake-N Beastie

hero intel nuc 13 rugged
You remember the NUC 8 Rugged? If you do, that's probably because you deployed them for your job or hobby. Rugged NUCs are exactly what they sound like: tiny Intel mini-PCs that have been ruggedized for industrial and commercial use. If you pay any attention to NUC numbering, you'll already have deduced that the last tough NUC was quite awhile ago, which means it's high time for a new one.

Intel hasn't actually announced the NUC 13 Rugged yet, but it's apparently code-named "Bravo Canyon." The name and details of this product originate with Intel itself, in fact, as the company's newest NUC product catalog includes a listing for the un-announced NUC 13 Rugged. Intel's managed to delete the product catalog from its own site, but it's still up—at least, for now—over at Mouser Electronics.

intel bravo canyon catalog pages

The catalog lists three varieties of NUC 13 Rugged, differentiated primarily by the type of processor inside. All three processors are based on Alder Lake-N silicon. If you're not familiar, these are Intel 12th-gen chips (although they launched alongside 13th-gen) that only include E-cores—no Golden Cove P-cores to be found.

nseries overview
These embedded Alder Lake-N processors are cut down from the base design.

Two of the chips got Atom branding: a quad-core model known as the Atom x7425E that sports a 12W TDP and a max boost of 3.4 GHz, and then a dual-core model called Atom x7211E with a 3.2 GHz peak Turbo clock. There's also the "Intel Processor N50," which is an even more cut-down version of the Intel Processor N100, with just two CPU cores and 16 execution units in its GPU.

nuc 13 rugged without heatsink
NUC 13 Rugged also will be available with an internal heatsink and antennas.

Owing to its industrial computing ambitions, the NUC 13 Rugged has a surprising amount of connectivity. You get dual HDMI 2.1 connections, dual 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet and Wi-Fi 6E (all Intel-powered), four external USB ports (two 10 Gbps) and another two internal, and MIPI CSI headers for off-the-shelf camera modules. The board includes 64GB of eMMC flash storage, but there are two M.2 sockets—one PCIe and one SATA—for additional storage expansion.

Of course, the main merit of such a machine is that it is fanless, and thus both significantly more robust as well as completely silent. Intel proudly boasts that these systems will be available for five years, and the company offers a three-year warranty on them, too. There's no pricing information yet, but FanlessTech says that they should be priced "extremely competitively."