Intel’s 10nm Ice Lake Processor to Release This Year with Sunny Cove Cores

Intel’s 10nm products have been delayed for several product generations, forcing the company to reiterate and refine their Skylake architecture and 14nm process tech to deliver Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake and their latest generation of Coffee Lake Refresh (Coffee Lake-R) processors. 2019 is the year where things change. 

During their CES keynote, Intel’s Gregory Bryant showcased the company’s “first volume 10nm client SoC”, an Ice Lake processor that will make use of the company’s recently revealed Sunny Cove core architecture (more info here) and 11th Gen graphics silicon (more info here). With Ice Lake and Sunny Cove, Intel moves away from their old naming scheme, where the company’s Core IP and product names are securely linked, decoupling product names from their underlying architecture.  

Intel 10nm Ice Lake will ramp this year, with the company planning to hit the market in high volumes in the “holiday 2019” sales period. Sadly, Intel’s first Ice Lake silicon appears to be designed for mobile systems, though it may ship in desktop form for low power devices.

While the chip is focused on mobile, Intel’s Ice Lake silicon boasts some impressive features, supporting native Thunderbolt 3, WiFi-6, artificial intelligence through DL Boost, and a 2x boost in image processing, if Intel’s demo is to be believed.  

Intel’s 10nm silicon is said to offer a 1.7x boost in density over their ageing 14nm process, with 10nm also boasting improved power efficiency. With Sunny Cove Intel also plans to boost the single-core performance of their processors, utilising changes in their Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) to do so. Since Skylake, Intel has only boosted single-threaded performance by increasing their clock speeds, making their ISA long overdue for an overhaul.