The wait for Intel's 10-nanometer chips is almost over. But don't expect any huge CPU performance boost from the company's new "Ice Lake" processors when they start arriving in laptops later this year.
In the run-up to Computex, Intel gave journalists a breakdown of key details around the new processors, which will start shipping to PC makers next month. And according to the company's own benchmarks, the 10nm processors offer only a 5 percent performance increase over the company's 14nm 8th generation "Whiskey Lake" processors, which launched in August.
That might disappoint some, given all the hype around Intel's 10nm technology. But the company's original goal was to launch 10nm processors in 2016. Chip-manufacturing delays thwarted that effort, so the company has instead been refining its 14nm process.
Putting Ice Lake Speed Gains in Perspective
Still, if you're upgrading from a five-year-old Intel PC, you can expect the 10nm processors to offer a 40 percent speed increase.
The new Ice Lake chips also excel in certain workloads, especially when it comes to AI-powered algorithms that run in the background. This might include PC software that can automatically de-blur photos, transcribe speech into text, or remove ambient noise from your Skype calls. According to Intel, the upcoming processors can run such computing tasks up to 2.5 times faster than older Intel chips, thanks to a new capability on board called "DL Boost."
Another enhancement on board is the presence of Intel's new "Sunny Cove" architecture, which replaces the company's Skylake architecture—a technology that's been in use since 2015. According to Intel's own benchmarks, the Sunny Cove computing cores can complete instructions per cycle on average 18 percent faster than what Skylake can muster.
"Your applications will get faster just by moving to this latest hardware," Ronak Singhal, an Intel fellow and CPU architect, told journalists.
More IGP Pep for Play?
Ice Lake's other big selling point is with gaming. You'll be able to play popular titles such as Fortnite and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive at 1080p, without the need for a dedicated graphics card. Thanks to Intel's new Gen 11 integrated graphics processor (IGP) silicon on board, the chips can run a game like CS:GO at 75 to 100 frames per second, a substantial upgrade from older Intel silicon, which could only muster 30 to 40 frames per second. (You'll still need to tone down on the graphics settings as Intel's benchmark shows.)
However, a big question is how the chips will perform in terms of power efficiency. Intel didn't offer any benchmarks on the battery-life front. But one of the company's vice presidents, Chris Walker, told PCMag the new chips should offer about twice the battery life of what laptops could offer three to four years ago.
Hail, Athena?
The Ice Lake chips will also be used to power new laptops through Intel's Project Athena initiative, which specifically requires the models to offer at least 16 hours in video playback, or nine hours of web browsing—all on one charge.
The Ice Lake chips will be sold as Intel's 10th Generation Core processors and will come in the standard Core i3, Core i5, and Core i7 variants, running up to four cores and eight threads. They'll arrive as 9-watt and 15-watt processors to support thin-and-light laptop models.
With Ice Lake, Intel has also included support to let PC makers add up to four Thunderbolt 3 ports to a single laptop. The same silicon can also support Wi-Fi 6, which can offer maximum download speeds of around 10Gbps, assuming you have a compliant router and hardware.
At the moment, Intel hasn't broken down all the chips within the family or their clock speeds. But expect the new processors to end up in more than 30 different product designs that'll go on sale later this year. At Computex, Intel showed one of the new models, a Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 convertible laptop. We'll have a from the show.