Intel Teases 10nm 'Ice Lake' CPUs, Special Edition Core i9

TAIPEI—In an inversion of the usual Computex order of things—in which Intel typically sets the tone with its major keynote on Tuesday, the trade show's opening day—AMD is instead in the perceived 2019 Computex driver's seat. AMD's CEO and president, Dr. Lisa Su, is slated to head off the Computex trade show with presumptive big news from the world of consumer CPUs as the keynote speaker on Monday morning.

To slow some of that momentum, Intel teased some of its wares the night before AMD's big moment: Its "Ice Lake" 10-nanometer, 10^th Generation mobile processors are indeed coming, and the company shared some info about these long-awaited chips' integrated graphics performance. The company also noted that a special version of the desktop Core i9-9900K, its top mainstream-line CPU, will go on sale this year. Its key distinction will be some tweakage to its core clocks.

Ice Is on the Horizon

For starters, 10-nanometer (nm) "Ice Lake" CPUs will ship in volume as mobile CPUs first, not desktop chips. Intel confirmed that the Ice Lake chips will be based on Intel's "Sunny Cove" architecture and incorporate what the company is calling its Gen11 integrated graphics solution. The platform will also work support both Wi-Fi 6 and Thunderbolt 3.

The first Ice Lake chips will ship "this year," according to a teaser brief shared by the company.

More Ice Lake details will likely follow at the Tuesday keynote, but for now, Intel is pushing the capabilities of the CPUs' onboard graphics, a traditional sore point on mainstream Intel chips versus AMD. The key slide shared here is this one:

This compares integrated graphics processor (IGP) performance from a commonly deployed "Whiskey Lake" U-series mobile chip and one of the upcoming Ice Lake mobile CPUs. Mind you: This is Intel's own internal testing. But the uptick across a range of key game titles is dramatic, among them team shooters with immense online followings (CS:GO, Rainbow Six: Siege).

The company also cited AI improvements, with inferencing upticks that will "usher in a new era of intelligent performance for PCs." The AI measure is according to Principled Technologies' AIXPRT benchmark.

In addition, the Gen 11 IGP will be the first IGP to incorporate a feature called "variable rate shading." In this rendering approach, portions of the video image that are less likely to be focused on by the user at a given moment are allocated less shader resources, freeing up muscle for other rendering work.

In one Intel slide, a 25-watt Ryzen 7 U and an Ice Lake U-series chip (the latter upticked to 25 watts for a fair comparison, according to reporting by Anandtech) get compared, showing a nontrivial performance uptick in a specific UL 3DMark feature test with the feature turned on versus off:

A Special Desktop Chip

The other tease from Intel: a tweaked version of the Core i9-9900K, its eight-core/16-thread desktop-CPU power monster. Dubbed the Core i9-9900KS, Intel claims that this new chip will run all eight of its cores at 5GHz. (The non-S Core i9-9900K hits this peak with just one core.)

This is along the lines of the Limited Edition of the Core i7 Intel rolled out in 2018, the Core i7-8086K. That chip was an upticked version of the then-flagship Core i7-8700K, with a single core out of its six cores running at 5GHz. It sold for a modest premium over the vanilla Core i7-8700K.

No pricing or availability data on the i9-9900KS was shared ahead of the Tuesday Intel keynote. At that event on Tuesday, May 28, we expect to hear more about the Ice Lake brigade and the Core i9-9900KS, among other Intel news. Stay tuned.

About Our Expert

John Burek

Executive Editor and PC Labs Director

My Experience

I have been a technology journalist for almost 30 years and have covered just about every kind of computer gear—from the 386SX to 64-core processors—in my long tenure as an editor, a writer, and an advice columnist. For almost a quarter-century, I worked on the seminal, gigantic Computer Shopper magazine (and later, its digital counterpart), aka the phone book for PC buyers, and the nemesis of every postal delivery person. I was Computer Shopper's editor in chief for its final nine years, after which much of its digital content was folded into PCMag.com. I also served, briefly, as the editor in chief of the well-known hard-core tech site Tom's Hardware.

During that time, I've built and torn down enough desktop PCs to equip a city block's worth of internet cafes. Under race conditions, I've built PCs from bare-board to bootup in under 5 minutes. I never met a screwdriver I didn't like.

I was also a copy chief and a fact checker early in my career. (Editing and polishing technical content to make it palatable for consumer audiences is my forte.) I also worked as an editor of scholarly science books, and as an editor of "Dummies"-style computer guidebooks for Brady Books (now, BradyGames). I'm a lifetime New Yorker, a graduate of New York University's journalism program, and a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

The Technology I Use

I use a lot of computers on rotation in my daily work, but I rely on just a few to get things done. I split my work life mostly between a Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 (a 15-inch Ryzen model), paired with a Lenovo ThinkVision portable monitor, and a custom-built big-chassis Windows 10 desktop PC that has served me well for years now. (Specs: Liquid-cooled Intel Core i7-6950X Extreme Edition, 32GB of RAM, and a GeForce GTX 1080 card.) That's all in a giant chassis with six hard drives and SSDs packing its bays. (As I upgrade systems, I just keep moving the old warhorse drives over.) This behemoth is hooked up to a 32-inch LG monitor.

I also have a bunch of PCs around the house, all custom builds: another one attached to my main TV (for gaming and occasional forays into VR), a mini-PC on the bedroom TV (acting as a media server), and a Mini-ITX desktop in a corner of the living room...just because. I carry around an oversize OnePlus phone, but when I do long-haul travel, a vintage iPod Touch comes along, too, for old times' sake.

I wasn't always a PC guy. I cut my teeth on a cassette-drive-equipped Commodore VIC-20 in the 1980s. But I got serious with Apple desktops in the early 1990s, starting with a Macintosh SE, then a Macintosh LC, and finally one of the short-lived Umax "clone" Macs, before building my first PC and never looking back.

With all my typing and editing work over the years, I've become a huge proponent of thumb trackballs, which minimize wrist action (and my wrist pain). I have a secret cache of the long-discontinued Microsoft Trackball Optical Mouse (my personal favorite), held in an undisclosed location.

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