Dr. Murthy Renduchintala, Intel’s chief engineering officer and group president of the Technology, Systems Architecture and Client Group delivered an update speaking at the 2019 Intel Investor Meeting on Wednesday, May 8, 2019, in Santa Clara, California and mentioned both 10nm and 7nm in 2021.
The 10nm processor technology seems finally fixed. Intel’s first volume 10nm processor, a mobile PC platform code-named “Ice Lake,” will begin shipping in June. Intel will start shipping to its OEMs who will take the time to prepare their notebook designs for the holiday season of 2019.
Ice Lake client 10nm
The Ice Lake 10nm is expected to deliver approximately three times (2.8x) faster wireless speeds, two times faster video transcode speeds, two times faster graphics performance, and 2.5 to 3 times faster artificial intelligence (AI) performance over previous generation products.
The 3x Ice Lake Wireless Speeds are based on the fact that new 802.11ax 2×2 160MHz enables 2402Mbps maximum theoretical data rates, some 2.8X faster than standard 802.11ac 2×2 80MHz with a peak speed of 867Mbps.
The two times faster Ice Lake Video Encode claim is based on 4k HEVC to 4k HEVC transcode (8bit) in Intel preproduction system, ICL (Ice Lake) 15W compared to WHL (Whiskey Lake) 15W. There is your answer; Ice Lake will probably start as a 15W TDP part.
Ice Lake U 15W 4+2 (six cores?)
The 2X graphics performance claim is based on 3Dmark 2011 score running an Intel Core i7 (ICL-U 4+2) PL1=15W TDP, 4C8T. That is most likely what Dell XPS 13 2020 should be running.
The 2.5x - 3x Ice Lake AI Performance comes from an image based workload, measured in images per second using AIXPRT Community Preview 2 with Int8 precision on ResNet-50 and SSD-Mobilenet-v1 models. The test Ice Lake system compares to HP spectre x360 13t 13-ap0038nr, Intel® Core™ i7-8565U, PL1 20w, 4C/8T, Turbo up to 4.6Ghz, Intel UHD Graphics 620, Gfx driver 26.20.100.6709, Memory 16GB DDR4-2400, Storage Intel SSD 760p 512GB, OS – Microsoft Windows 10 RS5 Build 475 Bios F.26.
Murthy pretty much revealed a lot about the upcoming Ice Lake processors that naturally are targeting thin and lite notebooks and should help to increase the performance at lower power consumption. The GPU will deliver 1 Tflops and will finally be able to offer some decent performance gaming on an Intel integrated graphics platform.
Intel also plans to launch multiple 10nm products across the portfolio through 2019 and 2020, including additional CPUs for client and server, the Intel Agilex family of FPGAs, the Intel Nervana NNP-I (AI inference processor), a general-purpose GPU and the “Snow Ridge” 5G-ready network system-on-chip (SOC).
The financial community got the first confirmation that Intel will be using 10nm for its general purpose GPU expected in 2020. It was interesting that at the Intel connectivity meeting a few weeks back at the Intel’s Santa Clara headquarters, most editors expected that Intel is building its GPU on 14++ nm while we had to insist that Intel has always been preparing and making a GPU on 10nm and later smaller nm.
That was the only way it had even a remote chance of competing.
The fact that Intel managed to improve 14nm to such extent is something to admire, but 10nm will get us to new hights and enable some exciting new OEM innovations.