I didn't mean to imply that there was a formal restriction on any product releases (that i'm aware of) but rather if there are gag orders due to Intel wanting to release exclusively at GDC then it would make sense that any products using the same chips need to go after it. I speculate this is the case due to the suspiciousness of the March event rumors. Regardless of which is to be believed (the original March 15 date or the revised 21-23 time period), I believe it's more than a slim chance that new rMBPs sporting "gaming grade" Iris 550/Iris Pro 580 parts are to be announced immediately after an Intel gaming conference (or AT the conference itself, if the 15th rumors were true). Intel has been very hush hush about Skylake NUC for some time , look at this toms article:
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-skull-canyon-gaming-pc-confirmed,30928.html
Before you ask, no, we weren’t allowed to take any pictures -- which is too bad, because that rumored “Skull Canyon” PC from Intel is real. It’s small, it’s thin, and it sports a SkullTrail logo.
We were hoping to cajole Intel into showing us anything related to the mini STX form factor we’ve been hearing about, but instead, we saw a 4 x 8-inch SFF PC that’s less than an inch thick. The chassis, which is close to being finalized, was a dark metallic gray, with slightly rounded-off edges.
It will run an (as yet unreleased) H-series Skylake (45 W) processor with Iris Pro graphics, and it will be soldered (BGA). The code name, as the initial rumors suggested, will be “Skull Canyon.” The tiny PC will offer DDR4 RAM and (likely) an M.2 SSD.
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There are four USB 3.0 ports, a full LAN port, and an SD card slot, and for video![]()
out, there’s DisplayPort, HDMI and a USB-C port. That last bit -- the USB-C port -- is key to the Skull Canyon PC, because it runs Thunderbolt 3.
As we’ve seen from the likes of Razer, Thunderbolt 3 over USB-C should enable the system to use a non-proprietary external GPU dock (while receiving power from the dock itself). The dock could also serve as a peripherals hub for your mouse, keyboard and monitor. Thus, like the Razer ultrabook and dock, that slim brick plus a desktop graphics dock could get you remarkable PC performance for the size.
Intel was tight-lipped about any plans for a GPU dock of its own, but from our pestering, we inferred that at the very least, it’s being discussed internally.
Intel is positioning this PC as a gaming device -- or more fairly, a gaming PC -- and specifically, it could be a Steam Machine. (We were told that the Skull Canyon PC would not ship with Windows, so we’re just doing the speculative arithmetic here.)
The Skull Canyon PC should launch Q2 -- perhaps at GDC. The price is TBD.
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