Intel has officially launched its mainstream (and volume) 10nm CPUs dubbed Ice Lake. Featuring the Sunnycove microarchitecture, the Ice Lake CPUs are shipping right now and should be on the shelves shortly. As always, the mobility side starts to ship first with desktop and enthusiast following along later.
New Ice Lake processors will range from Core i3 to Core i7 models, will feature up to four cores and eight threads, and will turbo up to 4.1GHz while integrated Iris Plus graphics will boost up to 1.1GHz.
They follow a following a 10nm (namometre) manufacturing process, which is significant, because it means that Intel has finally perfected a process which allows them to make more transistor-dense components. Previous generations of processors, like the Whiskey Lake line announced last year, followed a 14nm process. Smaller components mean that more of them can be fit onto a chip, so in theory, Ice Lake CPUs ought to offer performance several orders of magnitude above older chips.
The 10th generation processors are going to feature a set of sweeping changes, which includes big architectural improvements as well as a brand new integrated GPU (Gen 11 graphics). If everything goes well, 10nm desktop processors will be landing sometime later this year and should finally put Intel back on track for its rhythmic cadence of process.
All-day computing is now very much a thing with reports of 16 hours battery. The presence of WiFi6 and 5G (not to mention specter mitigations) makes this next wave of notebooks and ultrabooks one of the bigger changes in this industry.
Full specs, capabilities and indicative prices for Ice Lake CPUs have yet to be announced.
