May 29, 2019 at 15:00Intel introduced the tenth generation of Ice Lake 10 nm processors
After the not-so-impressive announcement of the new i9-9900KS on Intel's Computex, many would have thought that the company had finally lost ground and brought nothing impressive, unlike its direct competitor, AMD, which showed the third-generation Ryzen processor lineup . But yesterday, as part of the Computex exhibition, Intel held its second presentation, which demonstrated to the public a new, tenth generation of its processors in 10 nm increments, code-named Ice Lake (Sunny cove). The developments presented by Intel with the new manufacturing process are so far exclusively intended for the mobile segment. The company also showed twelve new processors for workstations and two for laptops from the Intel Xeon family.
Ice Lake is the direct descendant of Whiskey Lake processors for mobile devices. The main features of these processors: low power consumption, low TDP and a small, by modern standards, the number of cores.
The exact range was not presented, but according to Intel, all Ice Lake processors will have a heat dissipation of 9, 15 or 28 W, an updated graphics core for this CPU family, as well as a dedicated dedicated Gaussian Neural Accelerator logic block and support for vector integer instructions DL Boost (Deep Learning Boost) for machine learning.
All new processors of the Ice Lake family are conditionally divided into Ice Lake-U and Ice Lake-Y. Ice Lake-U - “senior” lineup of mobile processors with heat dissipation up to 15 W, Ice Lake-Y -
up to 9 watts. All processors will have a standard prefix of the form 10xxxU for mobile development. The maximum number of cores for new processors is four (8 threads), they will be equipped with Ice Lake-U models. The maximum frequency declared by Intel in Turbo mode is, at first glance, quite impressive for such "babies" 4.1 GHz per core.
But the question is, what frequencies have we already seen: the same i7-8665U gave 4.8 GHz clock in single-threaded mode for CPU0, and the i7-8565U certainly showed 4.1 GHz to all four of its cores in the mode Turbo
But the new processors still have significant differences from their predecessors, Whiskey Lake. Their main feature is the new controller, which will provide support for faster memory with new processors - up to DDR4-3200 with a channel of up to 60 GB / s. According to the specifications on the official Intel website, the company's engineers managed to achieve an almost twice as large channel and increase the supported frequency by one third: the i7-8665U model “held” only DDR4-2400 / LPDDR3-2133 and had a channel of 37.5 GB / s.
Of the interesting innovations, we have already mentioned a new logical unit and support for vector integer instructions. The attentive reader wondered: “Why?” and in some ways was right. It is not known how the engineers positioned the innovations during their work and whether these changes will find development in the “full-fledged” desktop processors from Intel in the future, but now these “lotions” are needed to more effectively solve problems such as speech recognition, simultaneous translation and semantic search . In this context, the mentioned innovations look more or less interesting, especially when it comes to processors for laptops and other mobile devices.
Intel also tried to please people who, for some reason, are trying to play on laptops. According to presentation data, the new Ice Lake GPU called Intel Iris Plus is almost twice as productive as the current Intel HD Graphics 630, which is equipped with current Intel processors.
At the presentation, they even brought FPS tests to CS: GO. True, this game in terms of FPS growth is very demanding not on the graphics core, but on the performance of the processor itself, so what Intel marketers tried to prove remains unclear. And the results were very mediocre: at 1080p in a smoke grenade, the FPS sank to 60, and the overall stable value was kept at 90 frames per second.
By the way, for a comfortable gaming experience, such shooters require a minimum of 120-200 (and preferably 300) frames per second with buffering turned off (the latter causes a noticeable input lag and creates a “kissel” effect when controlled). On the other hand, Intel does not compare its graphics core with full-fledged video frames, but simply cites graphics according to which the new development is much more powerful than its predecessors in terms of FPS at a resolution of 1080p. But in addition to the 90 FPS in CS: GO, the new graphics core provides adequate screen support and ultra-high-resolution content playback, as well as the ability to work with displays with higher frame rates. Intel claims that the new graphics core can cope with 120 Hz displays and 4K quality at the same time. Also, the new core supports HDR10 mode.
But what is really important for mobile devices is the wireless connection. The Ice Lake platform integrates the Intel Wi-Fi 6 (Gig +) wireless network adapter. The Wi-Fi implementation proposed by the company provides a data transfer rate of up to 1.7 Gb / s. The integrated Thunderbolt 3 controller is designed to support up to four ports on the opposite sides of the laptop. In addition, the new processors have an integrated Thunderbolt 3 interface with support for up to four ports of this kind.
The first laptop models with Ice Lake processors on board should appear in the fall as part of the Project Athena initiative- A project aimed at creating thin and light laptops with high performance and equipped with the latest technological innovations. In other devices, Ice Lake processors should appear by the end of this year.
With desktop and laptop Xeon, which presented "quietly" everything is much simpler and calmer. The specifications of the processors tell us that they will be manufactured using the current Sky Lake technology and no architectural innovations that we see in the mobile Ice Lake will affect these processors:
Nothing is known about the cost of the new Xeon, Intel will report this information later.
Ice Lake is the direct descendant of Whiskey Lake processors for mobile devices. The main features of these processors: low power consumption, low TDP and a small, by modern standards, the number of cores.
The exact range was not presented, but according to Intel, all Ice Lake processors will have a heat dissipation of 9, 15 or 28 W, an updated graphics core for this CPU family, as well as a dedicated dedicated Gaussian Neural Accelerator logic block and support for vector integer instructions DL Boost (Deep Learning Boost) for machine learning.
All new processors of the Ice Lake family are conditionally divided into Ice Lake-U and Ice Lake-Y. Ice Lake-U - “senior” lineup of mobile processors with heat dissipation up to 15 W, Ice Lake-Y -
up to 9 watts. All processors will have a standard prefix of the form 10xxxU for mobile development. The maximum number of cores for new processors is four (8 threads), they will be equipped with Ice Lake-U models. The maximum frequency declared by Intel in Turbo mode is, at first glance, quite impressive for such "babies" 4.1 GHz per core.
But the question is, what frequencies have we already seen: the same i7-8665U gave 4.8 GHz clock in single-threaded mode for CPU0, and the i7-8565U certainly showed 4.1 GHz to all four of its cores in the mode Turbo
But the new processors still have significant differences from their predecessors, Whiskey Lake. Their main feature is the new controller, which will provide support for faster memory with new processors - up to DDR4-3200 with a channel of up to 60 GB / s. According to the specifications on the official Intel website, the company's engineers managed to achieve an almost twice as large channel and increase the supported frequency by one third: the i7-8665U model “held” only DDR4-2400 / LPDDR3-2133 and had a channel of 37.5 GB / s.
Of the interesting innovations, we have already mentioned a new logical unit and support for vector integer instructions. The attentive reader wondered: “Why?” and in some ways was right. It is not known how the engineers positioned the innovations during their work and whether these changes will find development in the “full-fledged” desktop processors from Intel in the future, but now these “lotions” are needed to more effectively solve problems such as speech recognition, simultaneous translation and semantic search . In this context, the mentioned innovations look more or less interesting, especially when it comes to processors for laptops and other mobile devices.
Intel also tried to please people who, for some reason, are trying to play on laptops. According to presentation data, the new Ice Lake GPU called Intel Iris Plus is almost twice as productive as the current Intel HD Graphics 630, which is equipped with current Intel processors.
At the presentation, they even brought FPS tests to CS: GO. True, this game in terms of FPS growth is very demanding not on the graphics core, but on the performance of the processor itself, so what Intel marketers tried to prove remains unclear. And the results were very mediocre: at 1080p in a smoke grenade, the FPS sank to 60, and the overall stable value was kept at 90 frames per second.
By the way, for a comfortable gaming experience, such shooters require a minimum of 120-200 (and preferably 300) frames per second with buffering turned off (the latter causes a noticeable input lag and creates a “kissel” effect when controlled). On the other hand, Intel does not compare its graphics core with full-fledged video frames, but simply cites graphics according to which the new development is much more powerful than its predecessors in terms of FPS at a resolution of 1080p. But in addition to the 90 FPS in CS: GO, the new graphics core provides adequate screen support and ultra-high-resolution content playback, as well as the ability to work with displays with higher frame rates. Intel claims that the new graphics core can cope with 120 Hz displays and 4K quality at the same time. Also, the new core supports HDR10 mode.
But what is really important for mobile devices is the wireless connection. The Ice Lake platform integrates the Intel Wi-Fi 6 (Gig +) wireless network adapter. The Wi-Fi implementation proposed by the company provides a data transfer rate of up to 1.7 Gb / s. The integrated Thunderbolt 3 controller is designed to support up to four ports on the opposite sides of the laptop. In addition, the new processors have an integrated Thunderbolt 3 interface with support for up to four ports of this kind.
The first laptop models with Ice Lake processors on board should appear in the fall as part of the Project Athena initiative- A project aimed at creating thin and light laptops with high performance and equipped with the latest technological innovations. In other devices, Ice Lake processors should appear by the end of this year.
With desktop and laptop Xeon, which presented "quietly" everything is much simpler and calmer. The specifications of the processors tell us that they will be manufactured using the current Sky Lake technology and no architectural innovations that we see in the mobile Ice Lake will affect these processors:
Nothing is known about the cost of the new Xeon, Intel will report this information later.