Intel's NUC 11 Extreme, codenamed Beast Canyon, is a revisit - and in some terms, reimagining - of the Extreme performance NUC range by Intel. The new Beast Canyon NUCs will now support full-length discrete graphics cards as well Intel's compute element in a single, 8L compact case. The compute element, which we have already pictured before, has now been photographed up close, manifesting one of Intel's latest additions to its ARK database - the NUC features a Core i9-11900KB CPU.

Intel has registered four B-line CPUs on its Ark: the i9-11900KB (unlocked, mobile socket, NUC-bound); i7-11700B; i5-11500B; and i3-11100B. All of these CPUs are meant for the NUC form-factor, are part of Intel's Next Unit of Computing design, and will ship in an add-in card form factor which already includes the socketed, mobile CPU (likely in BGA packaging), the RAM sticks, storage subsystem, and I/O complex. It remains to be seen whether this new form-factor convinces those interested in such a system - the added capability to add full-length PCIe graphics cards may add some flexibility, but it does come at the expense of physical footprint for the new generation NUC.