Intel Ice Lake CPUs based on 10nm fabrication are now official

At CES 2019, Intel has made a big announcement, where the company has confirmed about the upcoming CPUs based on 10nm fabrication. With the Ice Lake series of CPUs, the company will mass produce the CPUs based on 10nm fabrication, which offers better power efficiency and better performance compared to the processor with 14nm fabrication.

As of now, there is no information on the actual date for the launch of the Ice Lake processors from Intel. According to the presentation, the Intel Ice Lake series of CPUs will be available in the market by the end of December 2019.

Unique features of Ice Lake-U CPUs

The Intel Ice Lake-U CPUs are the laptop class processors with 15W TDP. These processors come with a four-core design using Sunny Cove microarchitecture and Gen11 graphics.

The 15W quad-core processor supports two threads per core (a total of 8 threads) with 64 EUs of Gen11 graphics. The 64 EUs will be using the standard "GT2" mainstream configuration. These Ice Lake-U CPUs also support 50-60 GB/s of memory bandwidth with LPDDR4x memory type.

With respect to connectivity, the Intel Ice Lake-U chipsets support Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) on a laptop with Wi-Fi 6 support built on to the chipset. The chipset also supports Thunderbolt 3 via USB type C with native TB3 support (first Intel chipset to support native TB3).

The company has optimized the Ice Lake CPUs to offer better battery backup. A laptop with the Intel Ice Lake-U CPU will be capable of offering up to 25 hours of battery backup.

The upcoming Intel Ice Lake processors come with in-hardware measures to prevent Spectre v2 and Meltdown with enterprise-level security.