2 Thunderbolt ports is a nice change vs. the predecessors, at least until the long awaited OWC TB4 hub finally arrives.
Somewhat sad, that it's all TB3/USB3.
I wonder if you can actually buy these, through...
I got NUC8s i7 with Iris Plus for just €300/each, which was a really good deal. I use them as µ-servers and plan to use TB for a cluster network. 2TB ports makes that possible without a hub.
Really wanted to get a Ryzen 4800U or 5800U based NUC, but those are paper tigers these days.
Didn't really expect Tiger Lake to do much better, but a random search on amazon.de simply had it in stock and at a reasonable €550 including taxes and shipping.
The small premium over the i7-10700U predecessor (around €450) is easily offset with the 2.5Gbit onboard Ethernet and the 2nd TB3 port. The 3rd NUC I'll try to join into a TB cluster is a NUC8 with the Iris Plus 655 iGPU and that was a steal at €300 some months back.
My i7-1165G7 clocks to 5.42GHz probably just for milliseconds, but long enough for HWiNFO to catch and record it. Cinebench 20 and similar loads have it run at 4.1GHz on the short term 60Watt power budget, until the BIOS limits that to 30Watts on default settings. I'm not trying to use these in a render farm, the small form factor, great sprinty behavior and generally low noise/energy is just great.
Existing CentOS7/8 images run, but without the really seamless iGPU support (not an issue for the planned µ-server cluster use case), that made the older NUCs so convenient.
Just tried an ElRepo mainline kernel (5.11) on CentOS8, and that has the iGPU working without any visible glitches on OpenGL3.1 accelerated Plasma. Google's 3D maps in Chromium render in smooth real-time on 4k and as quickly as they do on Windows and put Microsoft's newest flight simulator and Bing maps to shame. Unigine Superposition sticks to 15FPs at FHD, it's not an Nvidia killer just yet.
The OWC TB4 hub works "as expected" with all these TB3 NUCs, unfortunately that doesn't yet include TB networking with the hub along the path. That's why I got it originally, to enable a point-to-point fabric with members that only have a single port, but now with the dual TB port NUC11, that will simply bridge the cluster between the single port NUC8 and NUC10.
Generally I get 10Gbit/s with iperf3 on Linux between NUCs on TB3, not quite the 40GB/s I had dreamed off, but the latencies are way better than anything you can do with 10GBase-T Ethernet: Pretty much Infiniband... and that's what I believe TB actually is: A cheap local peer-2-peer fabric usable for pretty much anything, storage, networking or rDMA shared memory, perhaps somewhat intentionally crippled by market segmentation.
For a Microsoft desktop these boxes look also quite great, 3DMark NightRaid runs >60FPS at full HD, which to me means it's reasonable for casual gaming or even Google 3D maps on 4K. Roughly speaking the NUC11 iGPU using DDR4-3200 is twice as fast as the "HD" iGPU of the i7-10710U in the NUC11, with the eDRAM enhanced Iris 655 iGPU stuck in the middle. Considering that I understood iGPU performance mostly as a RAM bandwidth constraint, I am quite impressed they are able to pull this off. I am also glad, that I never paid extra money for the eDRAM and Iris Plus hardware, even if it must have cost Intel dearly in production.
I'd love to see a Tiger Lake vs. Renoir iGPU comparison, but I'd doubt neither one can do terribly better with the thermal budget and the DRAM bandwidth available to them. With core number equivalents, both should be head-to-head on all features.
Geekbench5 on Linux also puts Tiger Lake amazingly close (1721) to my Ryzen 5800X (1794), on Windows the gap is a little bigger (1568/1674) for the single scores, multi-score seems pretty similar, too, when adjusted for the core count (4/8).
Tiger Lake may be a terrible production issue for Intel, but as a product for the consumer, it is not bad at all. Against a competitor that you can't buy, it's doing pretty well.
NUC10 fails to score against NUC11, 4 Tiger Lake cores perform almost identical to 6 Comet Lake, while using less power. What I noticed is that iGPU workloads don't seem to trigger the fan into high-gear, while CPU workloads sure do.
The the amount of control the NUC BIOS provides over the Wattage permitted to the box is really quite nice, to keep it from being noticeable under stress. Of course a run-time CLI or REST interface will be better yet, but I am not holding by breath for that coming to CentOS: RedhatIBM recently made sure of that...
Anything that screws their customers makes sense to Intel. You want this little feature that we specifically disabled on your CPU - pay us more to not disable it. And buy a motherboard with a chipset that will activate it despite having nothing to do with it. Yeah, I'm talking about ECC but that's just the most egregious example.
Let's hope that competition stays strong in the CPU space because AMD seem more than willing to go down that road too if there's nothing to keep them in check.
LOL - ECC is the latest thing the kiddies have latched onto - even on servers ECC was of dubious utility - unless you were flying your machine at 60K ft and was experiencing bit flips.
TB4 uses new controller which most likely requires redesigning the motherboard with no real benefits over TB3 besides stricter rules which don't matter in this case as Intel themselves handles the designing. TB4 is only important for 3rd party products that use minimum required specs in the standard.
That's what I thought, too, but it doesn't seem to be the case. Real SoC (or PCH) PCIe lanes need to be allocated to a TB controller, which will then require another TB chip to translate it back into whatever you want on the side (USB/display/PCIe).
As others already mentioned, the Intel ones do have a Thunderbolt advantage. Plus I'm glad to see 2.5 GbE is standard! (Compared to the links above, the Gigabyte and AsrockInd also have it, but not the other two.)
I still prefer my Hades Canyon over these new ones tbh, they've actually reduced the display outputs, no dual LAN etc, and a last gen Turing is a bit odd (instead of their own DG/Xe Graphics), but still a lot of power for a small size again.
Even the i7-8809G CPU is still slightly faster than an i7-1165G7
I am pretty sure that comes down to an internal antenna issue being limited to 5GHz - with the AX210 the only 6Ghz ones I have found have an external antenna and none of the NUC11s come with external antenna jacks.
Qi is optional
I am not interested in the Performance line - I want the Pro line.
Wi-fi 6e isn't even really out there yet, so you can't blame them for planning and making these models without them. That takes time. (Or is 6e set to be the defining buzz word for all new tech?)
I predict pricing will be insane. By insane I mean they will be more expensive than what you get in a comparable laptop with display and battery included. That is the trend for these NUC's.
MSRP always seems to be priced into realms of insanity. I got my NUC off of eBay, it came with a SSD, RAM, and loaded with Windows 10 in new retail NUC packaging for significantly less than the MSRP so yeah.... the market is weird.
I don't think external antenna is mandatory, there are wifi 6E flexible antenna products. My guess would be Intel being Intel and not offering the absolute best, or Windows doesn't have ax211 driver so ppl can't connect to wireless if they do fresh install
Some of these might be interesting, but that depends on the key information currently showing as "?" : pricing. I bought a NUC quite a while ago, and it was good value for the money. With these, Intel's apparent reluctance to say how much they want for them makes me wonder.
I thought Tiger Lake comes with support for upto 4x Thunderbolt 4/USB4 ports integrated.
I would rather it featured 4x Thunderbolt 4/USB4 ports for power, data and video. 2 in the front, 2 in the back. All 4 Thunderbolt supporting USB-PD which can deliver upto 100W to the host and 36W to devices. I can't wait for Thunderbolt to support PCIe 4.0 to facilitate eGPUs properly. I would have also included a SD Card Reader with support for SDUC and SD Express version 8. I love the idea of having 3 types of display protocols. Tiger Lake has 4 display pipes from the integrated display engine.
Intel missed an opportunity for a Quad line:
- Tiger Lake H 4C/8T (4 Cores) - 4x Thunderbolt 4/USB 4 ports based on PCIe 4.0x4 - 4TB Rocket Q4 NVMe PCIe 4.0 M.2 2280 Internal SSD Solid State Drive (SB-RKTQ4-4TB)
When are Xeon versions coming for those who want ECC? Also I never understood the segmentation. Pentium and Core i3 have ECC, but not Core i5-i9, you need their Xeon entry-level counterparts for that. Ok, but they hardly more expensive, yet are harder to source. What's the point ?!
The 8-core Tiger Lake H expected end of March should have a Xeon version, to replace Comet Lake H (Xeon W-108xx). Also Rocket Lake should have a Xeon version, to replace Comet Lake S (Xeon W-12xx).
Mobile workstation laptops from Dell, HP and Lenovo with the Tiger Lake Xeon should appear around April or May.
Very very late...they need to skip rocket lake and go to alder lake directly. they need to freaking ramp up that 10nm Enhanced super fin and push it forward together with 7nm EUV and 5nm GAAFET. Hope Pat will shake things up and cause they have got amazingly complacent.
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abufrejoval - Monday, January 18, 2021 - link
2 Thunderbolt ports is a nice change vs. the predecessors, at least until the long awaited OWC TB4 hub finally arrives.Somewhat sad, that it's all TB3/USB3.
I wonder if you can actually buy these, through...
I got NUC8s i7 with Iris Plus for just €300/each, which was a really good deal. I use them as µ-servers and plan to use TB for a cluster network. 2TB ports makes that possible without a hub.
Deicidium369 - Monday, January 18, 2021 - link
The NUC 11 Pro also offers the 1185G7 - the 1185G7 offers vPro and the 1165G7 doesn't1 TB4 port and 1 TB3 port in the Pro - the Performance line is 2 x TB3.
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/produc...
abufrejoval - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
Really wanted to get a Ryzen 4800U or 5800U based NUC, but those are paper tigers these days.Didn't really expect Tiger Lake to do much better, but a random search on amazon.de simply had it in stock and at a reasonable €550 including taxes and shipping.
The small premium over the i7-10700U predecessor (around €450) is easily offset with the 2.5Gbit onboard Ethernet and the 2nd TB3 port. The 3rd NUC I'll try to join into a TB cluster is a NUC8 with the Iris Plus 655 iGPU and that was a steal at €300 some months back.
My i7-1165G7 clocks to 5.42GHz probably just for milliseconds, but long enough for HWiNFO to catch and record it. Cinebench 20 and similar loads have it run at 4.1GHz on the short term 60Watt power budget, until the BIOS limits that to 30Watts on default settings. I'm not trying to use these in a render farm, the small form factor, great sprinty behavior and generally low noise/energy is just great.
Existing CentOS7/8 images run, but without the really seamless iGPU support (not an issue for the planned µ-server cluster use case), that made the older NUCs so convenient.
Just tried an ElRepo mainline kernel (5.11) on CentOS8, and that has the iGPU working without any visible glitches on OpenGL3.1 accelerated Plasma. Google's 3D maps in Chromium render in smooth real-time on 4k and as quickly as they do on Windows and put Microsoft's newest flight simulator and Bing maps to shame. Unigine Superposition sticks to 15FPs at FHD, it's not an Nvidia killer just yet.
The OWC TB4 hub works "as expected" with all these TB3 NUCs, unfortunately that doesn't yet include TB networking with the hub along the path. That's why I got it originally, to enable a point-to-point fabric with members that only have a single port, but now with the dual TB port NUC11, that will simply bridge the cluster between the single port NUC8 and NUC10.
Generally I get 10Gbit/s with iperf3 on Linux between NUCs on TB3, not quite the 40GB/s I had dreamed off, but the latencies are way better than anything you can do with 10GBase-T Ethernet: Pretty much Infiniband... and that's what I believe TB actually is: A cheap local peer-2-peer fabric usable for pretty much anything, storage, networking or rDMA shared memory, perhaps somewhat intentionally crippled by market segmentation.
For a Microsoft desktop these boxes look also quite great, 3DMark NightRaid runs >60FPS at full HD, which to me means it's reasonable for casual gaming or even Google 3D maps on 4K. Roughly speaking the NUC11 iGPU using DDR4-3200 is twice as fast as the "HD" iGPU of the i7-10710U in the NUC11, with the eDRAM enhanced Iris 655 iGPU stuck in the middle. Considering that I understood iGPU performance mostly as a RAM bandwidth constraint, I am quite impressed they are able to pull this off. I am also glad, that I never paid extra money for the eDRAM and Iris Plus hardware, even if it must have cost Intel dearly in production.
I'd love to see a Tiger Lake vs. Renoir iGPU comparison, but I'd doubt neither one can do terribly better with the thermal budget and the DRAM bandwidth available to them. With core number equivalents, both should be head-to-head on all features.
Geekbench5 on Linux also puts Tiger Lake amazingly close (1721) to my Ryzen 5800X (1794), on Windows the gap is a little bigger (1568/1674) for the single scores, multi-score seems pretty similar, too, when adjusted for the core count (4/8).
Tiger Lake may be a terrible production issue for Intel, but as a product for the consumer, it is not bad at all. Against a competitor that you can't buy, it's doing pretty well.
NUC10 fails to score against NUC11, 4 Tiger Lake cores perform almost identical to 6 Comet Lake, while using less power. What I noticed is that iGPU workloads don't seem to trigger the fan into high-gear, while CPU workloads sure do.
The the amount of control the NUC BIOS provides over the Wattage permitted to the box is really quite nice, to keep it from being noticeable under stress. Of course a run-time CLI or REST interface will be better yet, but I am not holding by breath for that coming to CentOS: RedhatIBM recently made sure of that...
DigitalFreak - Monday, January 18, 2021 - link
TB3 doesn't make any sense. TB4/USB4 is built into the processor.dontlistentome - Monday, January 18, 2021 - link
The only difference is TB4 guarantees 4 PCI lanes vs 2 (4 optional) on TB3. My i5 7th gen NUC used 4 lanes with TB3.Eliadbu - Monday, January 18, 2021 - link
TB4 also guarantees to work with USB 4, TB3 does not. So in the look for the future TB 4 will offer more versatile option.Deicidium369 - Monday, January 18, 2021 - link
TB4 is available on the Pro line - but not the Performance lineOFelix - Monday, January 18, 2021 - link
Hey AnandTech, what is going on? How does it make any sense for TGL to be shipping either with TB3 or with 1xTB4 + 1xTB3?Furious minds want to know!
kobblestown - Tuesday, January 19, 2021 - link
Anything that screws their customers makes sense to Intel. You want this little feature that we specifically disabled on your CPU - pay us more to not disable it. And buy a motherboard with a chipset that will activate it despite having nothing to do with it. Yeah, I'm talking about ECC but that's just the most egregious example.Let's hope that competition stays strong in the CPU space because AMD seem more than willing to go down that road too if there's nothing to keep them in check.
Deicidium369 - Thursday, January 21, 2021 - link
LOL - ECC is the latest thing the kiddies have latched onto - even on servers ECC was of dubious utility - unless you were flying your machine at 60K ft and was experiencing bit flips.vladx - Tuesday, January 19, 2021 - link
TB4 uses new controller which most likely requires redesigning the motherboard with no real benefits over TB3 besides stricter rules which don't matter in this case as Intel themselves handles the designing. TB4 is only important for 3rd party products that use minimum required specs in the standard.Deicidium369 - Thursday, January 21, 2021 - link
Every NUC generation is a new design - not like they are taking the NUC10 and putting a TGL in it.abufrejoval - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
That's what I thought, too, but it doesn't seem to be the case. Real SoC (or PCH) PCIe lanes need to be allocated to a TB controller, which will then require another TB chip to translate it back into whatever you want on the side (USB/display/PCIe).abufrejoval - Friday, February 19, 2021 - link
Shoot, reread the article and now I'm just really confused... please ignore my last comment.AdditionalPylons - Monday, January 18, 2021 - link
I would normally be super excited about new NUCs. Now I'm just waiting for a Ryzen 5000 based version of one of these:https://www.gigabyte.com/Mini-PcBarebone/GB-BRR7H-...
https://www.asrockind.com/en-gb/4X4%20BOX-4800U
https://www.asus.com/Displays-Desktops/Mini-PCs/Al...
https://www.asrock.com/nettop/AMD/Mars%204000U%20S...
As others already mentioned, the Intel ones do have a Thunderbolt advantage.
Plus I'm glad to see 2.5 GbE is standard! (Compared to the links above, the Gigabyte and AsrockInd also have it, but not the other two.)
Skeptical123 - Monday, January 18, 2021 - link
I could not agree more, I suspect a we are not alone and this product segment will continue to heatup.powerarmour - Monday, January 18, 2021 - link
I still prefer my Hades Canyon over these new ones tbh, they've actually reduced the display outputs, no dual LAN etc, and a last gen Turing is a bit odd (instead of their own DG/Xe Graphics), but still a lot of power for a small size again.Even the i7-8809G CPU is still slightly faster than an i7-1165G7
Deicidium369 - Monday, January 18, 2021 - link
The Performance line is the low end model - with the Pro line coming with the 1185G7.https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/produc...
offers the 2nd 2.5Gb/s NIC and the 1185G7.
Jorgp2 - Monday, January 18, 2021 - link
it has four outputsava1ar - Wednesday, January 20, 2021 - link
Hades Canyon has 6 outputs, so comparing to it 4 is definitely a downgrade.Deicidium369 - Thursday, January 21, 2021 - link
You using 6 monitors? If you aren't then it isn't a downgradeAdityaseven7 - Monday, January 18, 2021 - link
wtf Intel, HDMI 2.1 + Wi-Fi 6e AX210 (with 6ghz & bt 5.2) would've been marvelous additions instead of this qi charging crap...what a shame.Deicidium369 - Monday, January 18, 2021 - link
I am pretty sure that comes down to an internal antenna issue being limited to 5GHz - with the AX210 the only 6Ghz ones I have found have an external antenna and none of the NUC11s come with external antenna jacks.Qi is optional
I am not interested in the Performance line - I want the Pro line.
damianrobertjones - Tuesday, January 19, 2021 - link
Wi-fi 6e isn't even really out there yet, so you can't blame them for planning and making these models without them. That takes time. (Or is 6e set to be the defining buzz word for all new tech?)saratoga4 - Monday, January 18, 2021 - link
Why is the protocol converter required? Doesn't tiger lake have native hdmi 2.0?bill44 - Tuesday, January 19, 2021 - link
I would like to know the answer to this too.vPro version will come with HDMI 2.1! How come?
Deicidium369 - Thursday, January 21, 2021 - link
the NUC11 Pro - 1185G7 vPro does not -it has Dual HDMI 2.0b w/HDMI CEC, Dual DP 1.4a via Type C
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/produc...
Hulk - Monday, January 18, 2021 - link
I predict pricing will be insane. By insane I mean they will be more expensive than what you get in a comparable laptop with display and battery included. That is the trend for these NUC's.Operandi - Monday, January 18, 2021 - link
MSRP always seems to be priced into realms of insanity. I got my NUC off of eBay, it came with a SSD, RAM, and loaded with Windows 10 in new retail NUC packaging for significantly less than the MSRP so yeah.... the market is weird.Deicidium369 - Monday, January 18, 2021 - link
NUC 11 Pro with 1185G7 probably no less than $750 - not including memory and SSD.AdrianBc - Monday, January 18, 2021 - link
The price in Europe for NUC11TNHv70L, i.e. the top model with 1185G7 and dual Ethernet + 6 USB Type A is announced as EUR 650.Normally in USA the price in USD is the same, so it should be $650, $100 less than your estimate.
Fulljack - Monday, January 18, 2021 - link
Intel already sell AX210 with Wifi 6E and BT 5.2 but why still release this with AX201?Deicidium369 - Monday, January 18, 2021 - link
the 6GHz band requires an external antenna - and I have not seen a single NUC11 with external antenna jacks.erinadreno - Wednesday, January 20, 2021 - link
I don't think external antenna is mandatory, there are wifi 6E flexible antenna products. My guess would be Intel being Intel and not offering the absolute best, or Windows doesn't have ax211 driver so ppl can't connect to wireless if they do fresh installDeicidium369 - Thursday, January 21, 2021 - link
for 6Ghz it is. and it's the AX210 - and if it means so much to you, you can replace the AX201 - it is NOT soldered down.LOL - you are not interested in this product, trying to find some reason to bash Intel
eastcoast_pete - Tuesday, January 19, 2021 - link
Some of these might be interesting, but that depends on the key information currently showing as "?" : pricing. I bought a NUC quite a while ago, and it was good value for the money. With these, Intel's apparent reluctance to say how much they want for them makes me wonder.KimGitz - Tuesday, January 19, 2021 - link
I thought Tiger Lake comes with support for upto 4x Thunderbolt 4/USB4 ports integrated.I would rather it featured 4x Thunderbolt 4/USB4 ports for power, data and video. 2 in the front, 2 in the back. All 4 Thunderbolt supporting USB-PD which can deliver upto 100W to the host and 36W to devices.
I can't wait for Thunderbolt to support PCIe 4.0 to facilitate eGPUs properly.
I would have also included a SD Card Reader with support for SDUC and SD Express version 8.
I love the idea of having 3 types of display protocols. Tiger Lake has 4 display pipes from the integrated display engine.
Intel missed an opportunity for a Quad line:
- Tiger Lake H 4C/8T (4 Cores)
- 4x Thunderbolt 4/USB 4 ports based on PCIe 4.0x4
- 4TB Rocket Q4 NVMe PCIe 4.0 M.2 2280 Internal SSD Solid State Drive (SB-RKTQ4-4TB)
Deicidium369 - Thursday, January 21, 2021 - link
Well Tiger Lake also supports LPDDR4x and DDR5 - and 8 coresZoZo - Tuesday, January 19, 2021 - link
When are Xeon versions coming for those who want ECC?Also I never understood the segmentation. Pentium and Core i3 have ECC, but not Core i5-i9, you need their Xeon entry-level counterparts for that. Ok, but they hardly more expensive, yet are harder to source. What's the point ?!
AdrianBc - Tuesday, January 19, 2021 - link
The 8-core Tiger Lake H expected end of March should have a Xeon version, to replace Comet Lake H (Xeon W-108xx). Also Rocket Lake should have a Xeon version, to replace Comet Lake S (Xeon W-12xx).Mobile workstation laptops from Dell, HP and Lenovo with the Tiger Lake Xeon should appear around April or May.
Deicidium369 - Thursday, January 21, 2021 - link
Tiger Lake U and H are they only versions - there will not be a Xeon variant based on TGLIce Lake SP is Sunny Cove
Sapphire Rapids is Golden Cove which on the desktop is Alder Lake
Deicidium369 - Thursday, January 21, 2021 - link
That's a part of the NUC line - specifically the NUC Element for Xeon... and not aware of any Pentium or Core i3 that has ECC. ONLY the Xeon has ECCyeeeeman - Tuesday, January 19, 2021 - link
Very very late...they need to skip rocket lake and go to alder lake directly. they need to freaking ramp up that 10nm Enhanced super fin and push it forward together with 7nm EUV and 5nm GAAFET. Hope Pat will shake things up and cause they have got amazingly complacent.