Intel Wall Street Canyon NUC Breaks Cover As A Mac Studio Rival In Extensive Leak
Intel might be readying a Next Unit of Computing (NUC) codenamed Wall Street Canyon that's built around Alder Lake-P, but what's really interesting is the potential marketing angle. If the latest leak is to be believed, Intel will bestow its mini PC the retail moniker NUC Studio Pro 12. That's either taking a clear shot at Apple's recently released Mac Studio, or is one heck of a coincidence.
This is a leak, mind you, so a proper dosage of skepticism recommended. That said, the alleged NUC Studio Pro 12 showed up on Chiphell in the smaller 4x4 form factor like the Frost Canyon NUC we reviewed a couple of year ago, rather than the larger form factor used for the Dragon Canyon NUC 12 Extreme, a fire breathing beast with a bigger belly.
According to the purported review, Wall Street Canyon arrives with five Alder Lake-P processor options culminating in the Core i7-1270P (12C/16T, Iris Xe with 96 EUs) with vPro. The other Core i7 SKU is the Core i7-1260P (non-vPro), followed by two Core i5 chips—Core i5-1250P and Core i5-1240P—and the Core i3-1220P (10C/12T, UHD graphics).
Intel is apparently sticking with DDR4 in its Wall Street Canyon NUC even though Alder Lake supports DDR5 memory. That's not necessarily a bad thing—DDR4 is cheaper and more plentiful at the moment. The NUC is equipped with two DDR4 SO-DIMM slots and supports speeds up to 3200 MT/s.
There's also an empty M.2 slot for installing a PCIe 4.0 x4 SSD, and another one occupied with an Intel AX211 Wi-Fi 6E card. Users may also install a 2.5-inch SATA drive into the NUC.
The port selection on the front of the NUC includes a pair of USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports (10Gbps) and a 3.5mm headphone jack. Then around back, users will find two Thunderbolt 4 ports (DisplayPort 1.4a), two HDMI 2.0b outputs, USB 3.1 and 2.0 Type-A ports (one each), and a 2.5G LAN port for wired networking.
Using an engineering chip, the user who leaked the NUC scored 25% higher in CPU-Z's single-thread test compared to the previous generation NUC 11, and doubled the multi-threaded score. And in Cinebench, the Core i7-1260P bested a Core i5-12400 in the single-core test and scored around the same in the multi-core test.
They posted a handful of other NUC Studio 12 Pro benchmarks, but one of the more interest observations was the reduction in sound versus the previous generation. The user notes it runs much quieter than the previous generation.
We'll have to wait and see if (A) this product arrives, (B) it retains the NUC Studio 12 Pro branding, and (C) how it fares against Apple's Mac Studio.
Images courtesy of Someone's Vest (via Chiphell)
