Intel Corp.’s journey to bring its 10-nanometer Ice Lake chip architecture to market has been a long and bumpy one, but the chipmaking giant has finally arrived. 

The company today unveiled the first 11 central processing units to feature the new design. They’re built for use in laptops and can carry out 18% more instructions per clock cycle than previous-generation processors, which means they run software that much faster pound-for-pound.

Graphics performance is better as well. As laptop CPUs, the new processors are not designed to work with a standalone graphics processing unit but rather feature a lighter, built-in GPU. The Iris Plus, as the module is called, is hailed as being capable of delivering twice the performance of its predecessor.

The exact graphics performance varies among the 11 CPU models. At the top of the compute totem pole is the Core i7-1068G7, the flagship of the lineup, which features 4 processing cores that with a 2.3-gigahertz base clock speed. They can go up to 4.1 gigahertz when a user is running CPU-hungry applications.

The remaining 10 chips in the lineup are split into two families. The Y-Series processors have a thermal design power ranging from nine to 12 watts, while the more powerful U-Series is in the 15- to 25-watt range. This translates into a 5% to 15% overall difference in performance between the families. 

Besides the extra instructions per clock cycle provided by Ice Lake, there are also other features that contribute to the new CPUs’ increased speed. One of them is the Deep Learning Boost technology that Intel has brought over from its server processors. Deep Learning Boost is an instruction set, an extension to the machine language in which GPU operations are expressed, that helps the chips execute machine learning workflows faster.

Also new is something Intel calls the Gaussian & Neural Accelerator. It’s a module inside the Ice Lake processors that speeds up background tasks such as processing voice input from a user’s microphone.

Intel didn’t provide an exact date for when the GPUs will launch but promises that the first laptops featuring its 10-nanometer silicon will hit stores in time for the holidays. Major hardware makers have already lined up 35 Ice Lake devices so far. 

Later this month, Intel plans to unveil a second line of 10-nanometer CPUs dubbed Comet Lake. A recent leak revealed that the series is set to target the desktop market and will provide significantly higher performance than Ice Lake. 

Photo: Intel