After half a decade at 14nm, Intel is finally preparing to ship its first 10nm processors for laptops. These form Intel’s 10th generation, codenamed Ice Lake, and incorporate dozens of new features and performance enhancements. This is one of the biggest leaps we’ve seen from Intel in some time, and the tenth generation could be transformative for laptop gaming, AI-accelerated processing and content creation – not to mention Intel’s other big focus here, its Project Athena laptops. There’s a lot to unpack here, so take a look at our hand-curated highlights.
First of all, we’re looking at the usual trio of product families: Core i3 at the low end, Core i5 in the mid range and Core i7 at the very top – no surprises there. Intel is targeting three different TDPs here – 9W, 15W and 28W – with the fastest chips offering four Sunny Cove cores with hyperthreading, an 8MB LL cache and a maximum turbo frequency of 4.1GHz. Intel quote an average IPC improvement of 18 per cent for 10th-gen chips compared to their 6th-gen counterparts in a variety of tasks, which is a substantial improvement.
Some 10nm processors also come with an improved integrated graphics solution called Iris Plus. The idea here is to offer enough horsepower, more than one teraflop, to guarantee 1080p/60fps in esports titles like Fortnite and Apex Legends. Results provided by Intel show that frame-rates improve by 40 to 80 per cent in titles like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Overwatch, Fortnite and Rainbox Six Siege at low or medium settings compared to Intel’s last-generation efforts at the same power targets. However, the new integrated GPU does benefit from faster LPDDR4X-3733 RAM, compared to DDR4 2400 on 8th-gen parts.
These results match a demonstration given to us at an Intel event, where average frame-rates in CS:GO at 1080p and medium settings improved from 43fps on an 8th generation system to 87fps on a roughly equivalent 10th generation system. Hopefully we’ll see similar results when we test in a more controlled environment later on. You can see the scenes tested below, with both scores incorporated into each screenshot (and you can grab the original screenshots in their entirety here). The company also showed off new adaptive sync support, which eliminates screen tearing and judder without the excessive input lag caused by traditional v-sync. We found that adaptive sync is most useful for games running between 40 and 60fps, so this is a good option for more recent games that aren’t able to max out a 60Hz laptop screen.
Intel has also improved video playback and rendering, with a doubling of HEVC encode speeds, support for HDR10 and DolbyVision. That should allow real-time encoding or decoding of 8K 10-bit video. In terms of connectivity, up to three 4K60 displays can be connected and 5K60 and 4K120 10-bit monitors are also supported.