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You are here: Home / ESXi / Decoding Intel NUC "Canyon" Generation with CPU "Lake" Generation Codenames

Decoding Intel NUC "Canyon" Generation with CPU "Lake" Generation Codenames

01.28.2020 by William Lam // 9 Comments

Swift Canyon, Baby Canyon, Bean Canyon, Provo Canyon, Kaby Lake, Whiskey Lake, Coffee Lake ... these are just some of the Intel codenames that either refer to a NUC platform or CPU generation. I can understand the need for codenames, however for consumers, the various names are often confusing and being able to grok at which system is the "latest" is not always trivial. In some cases there are multiple updates to different generations of the platform all happening within a short period of time and most online sites may swap between codenames and the official "Nth" generation nomenclature.

I have been working with the Intel NUC platform from a VMware standpoint since the 6th Generation back in 2016 and even I still get confused at times on what is the latest "Canyon" NUCs and their respective "Lake" CPU generations. I can not imagine how complicated this might feel for some of our customers who are updating their VMware homelab every couple of years or someone who is just starting out for the first time. To not only help keep myself sane as I often get asked about Homelabs, literally on a weekly basis and to help educate others within out community, I have created a document which maps all Intel NUCs (full height) to their respective Nth generation along with the respective CPU architecture used in each platform.

This will be a living document that I plan to keep up to date as it pertains to running VMware on Intel NUCs. As of writing this blog post, there has been a total of 14 NUCs spanning 6th to 10th generations of the platform. I hope this reference will come in handy as folks look to building their own VMware homelab and understanding what options exists at a quick glance.

Short URL: vmwa.re/nuc

Note: If you are interested in understanding the Intel NUC product code naming convention, they have a very useful KB31273 which includes more details.

More from my site

  • VMware Cloud Foundation on Intel NUC?
  • ESXi on Intel NUC 12 Enthusiast (Serpent Canyon)
  • ESXi on Intel NUC 12 Pro (Wall Street Canyon)
  • ESXi on Intel NUC 12 Extreme (Dragon Canyon)
  • Considerations for future vSphere Homelabs due to upcoming removal of SD card/USB support for ESXi

Categories // ESXi, Home Lab Tags // Intel NUC

Comments

  1. RM says

    01/28/2020 at 9:26 am

    I have one to add. NUC7PJYH: June Canyon / Gemini Lake. I own one.

    Reply
    • William Lam says

      01/29/2020 at 6:43 am

      Thanks, I'm aware of the June Canyon and although it and others can run ESXi without issues, I'm specifically capturing the systems with two drives as vSAN comes up often or support for multiple datastores.

      Reply
  2. Justin says

    01/28/2020 at 10:12 am

    Comet Lake is 14nm, not 10.

    Reply
    • William Lam says

      01/29/2020 at 6:44 am

      Yup, fixing shortly as someone caught this on Twitter as well 🙂

      Reply
  3. yoyo42 says

    01/28/2020 at 10:51 am

    I just want the order to be obvious when I'm trying to apply EVC a cluster, so I can pick the highest functioning that my host supports. The UI gives no clues, you need to be an Intel historian...

    Reply
    • J.Grimm says

      02/05/2020 at 7:44 am

      +1 for this issue! I've got NUC7, NUC8 and now NUC10, each with different 'lakes' and trying to map EVC is a chore.

      Reply
  4. Peter Bowen says

    01/29/2020 at 7:46 am

    Cannon Lake in the Crimson Canyon is 10nm not 14nm. CNL is Intel's first 10nm chip and only has one known SKU.

    Reply
    • William Lam says

      01/29/2020 at 9:43 am

      Peter,

      Thanks for the catch. Will update shortly

      Reply
  5. Jack H (@jackharvest) says

    01/30/2020 at 12:15 am

    Thanks William. This makes things so much more clear; I can more easily cherry-pick which NUCs I'm going to be adding 10Gbe to next. Now if only they gave me an extra SATA header on the inside for VSAN + 10Gbe...

    Reply

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Author

William Lam is a Senior Staff Solution Architect working in the VMware Cloud team within the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group (CIBG) at VMware. He focuses on Cloud Native technologies, Automation, Integration and Operation for the VMware Cloud based Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC)

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