Ultra-compact form-factor PCs have emerged as bright spots in the PC market over the last decade after Intel introduced the NUC. The company celebrated the 10-year anniversary of its introduction last year with the Alder Lake-based 4"x4" Wall Street Canyon NUCs. Barely a couple of quarters down the road, Intel is updating its Pro line of UCFF NUCs with the 13th Gen. Core Processors (Raptor Lake). The new Arena Canyon NUCs carry forward the same hardware features of the Wall Street Canyon SKUs, with the only update being the change in the internal SoC.
Raptor Lake-P brings incremental gains in terms of both performance and power efficiency over Alder Lake-P. We already saw one of Intel's partners – ASRock Industrial – take the lead in delivering UCFF mini-PCs based on Raptor Lake-P. How does Intel's own efforts in the segment pan out? Read on to find out more about Intel's lineup of Arena Canyon NUCs and a detailed investigation into the performance profile of the NUC13ANKi7 based on the Core i7-1360P.
