Intel details 10th Gen, 10nm Ice Lake CPUs

Intel has revealed the specifications of its first 10nm Ice Lake CPUs, detailing 11 new CPUs spanning 9W-28W TDPs, which will be found in laptops shipping this Holiday season, with over 35 designs confirmed so far.

The 11 CPUs are further divided into the ulta-low-power Y-Series (9W parts with 12W ConfigUP available) and the low-power U-Series (15W-28W), with Core i3, Core i5, and Core i7 CPUs featuring in both families, and Intel has introduced a new naming scheme to differentiate individual units. The full specs tables are reproduced below:

Intel 10th Gen Core U-Series

Intel 10th Gen Core Y-Series

While the familiar Core i3/i5/i7 remains intact, the new naming scheme for individual units does away with ‘U’ and ‘Y’ suffixes and opted for a format as follows: 10xyGz. The Gz bit is the easiest to understand, with the number chosen for ‘z’ corresponding with how powerful the graphics is and how many Execution Units (EUs) the onboard GPU has. In the ‘xy’ segment, the ‘x’ seems to refer simply to Core i7 (6), Core i5 (3), or Core i3 (0), while ‘y’ refers to the TDP (28W = 8, 15W = 5, and 9W = 0).

As previously reported, the chips will be manufactured on Intel’s 10nm process and feature the new Sunny Cove CPU architecture and Gen11 graphics architecture. They support LPDDR4x-3733 and DDR4-3200 memory, and both Wi-Fi 6 and Thunderbolt 3 are integrated onto the 10nm Ice Lake SoC, with Intel confirming that all CPUs can enable up to four Thunderbolt 3 ports (the actual count will depend on the manufacturer of the laptop, though). DL Boost (Deep Learning boost) is also enabled on all SKUs; this means native support for certain AVX-512 instructions that accelerate AI workloads.

Sadly, Intel would not be drawn into commenting on its plans for 10nm beyond these mobile-focussed parts, so there’s no news regarding its appearance on the desktop any time soon. Recent leaks suggest that 10th Gen desktop ‘Comet Lake’ CPUs will be based again on 14nm, however.

The 10th Gen Ice Lake CPUs are expected to launch in laptops this Holiday season. No pricing has been confirmed or hinted at, but as these CPUs will form the basis of Intel’s Project Athena, you probably can expect ‘premium’ to be an accurate description.