About a year ago, Intel launched its 10nm Jasper Lake Atoms. These Atoms are on a newer Intel process and feature the new Tremont core. One of the stranger parts of this launch is that it happened with basically no fanfare. While the leaks of the new line occurred in May 2021, along with many headlines of the Intel NUC 11 Essential kits coming soon, it took until January 2022 for these NUCs to hit launch.
Intel Atlas Canyon NUCs with Jasper Lake Launched
A quick check on the Intel Ark comparison view shows that these kits are now in the “Launched” status with “Q1’22” as the date, only about two weeks into the quarter.
As one can see, these units have the new 10nm Atoms with the Intel Pentium Silver N6005 and N5105 being quad-core units and the 10W Celeron N4505 being a dual-core unit.
We did a piece on Intel Tremont Low Power Architecture Detailed back in 2019 just for some sense of how long the wait has been.
One of the big advancements was in the performance per core of these lower-power parts.
Here is the block diagram for Tremont from that 2019 piece:
While many of our readers prefer higher-power NUCs, these are the NUCs that start to compete as a step above the Raspberry Pi boxes but below some of the higher-power NUCs and Project TinyMiniMicro 1L PCs.
Final Words
At this point, let us face it, what we really hoped to have tried at this point is the Snow Ridge Atom P5962B 24-core part. Since it is looking less likely that that will ever happen, perhaps the next closest thing for a low-power Atom node will be these NUCs. Hopefully, the Intel NUC 11 NUC11ATKPE becomes available soon so we can get one to try out. It would be great to try one of these Atlas Canyon NUCs.
