Other metrics, such as the out of order (OoO) window, were widened, while in-flight loads and stores capability are both increased tremendously.


Intel already covered part of the microarchitecture during its architecture day, which you can see here, but expanded on the block diagram. Here we can see how the instructions feed in from the front end (red blocks at the top of the diagram) into the larger micro-op cache at four to six operations per cycle, which then feeds an expanded back end that can handle more uOps it can store and execute. Intel has also integrated AVX-512 into a different location in the architecture (yellow blocks), increased the L1 cache for the first time in a decade, and doubled the L2 cache. The processor has one 512- and one 256-bit FMA unit.

Ice Lake IPC Improvements


Intel improved the instructions per cycle (IPC) throughput significantly, claiming an average gain of 15 to 18%. The company measured the improvements at the same core clock and memory speed, and with the same software, against the previous-gen microarchitectures in a number of workloads (second image above) to derive its IPC measurements.

Ice Lake 14nm PCH


Intel also improved the PCH to include a FIVR (Fully Integrated Voltage Regulator) that reduces the amount of space (by 15%) that OEMs have to dedicate to power delivery rails (now only five). That eventually results in smaller motherboards, and thus smaller devices. A Wi-Fi 6 MAC is also integrate on the chipset, but it still requires a PHY for operation, thus reducing costs and avoiding additional FCC requirements for the chipset. Intel offers its own CNVi module as the other half of the integrated solution.

Intel has left the PCH on the mature 14nm process, but it comes with a number of expanded I/O capabilities and an improved audio DSP that enables Wake-On-Voice support and enhanced voice recognition for Alexa and Cortana, along with other voice-activated personal assistants. The new audio DSP supports several independent voice-activated applications simultaneously while the PC is in a low power state.


TitanIntel's DL boost consists of new vecor instructions that boost INT8 performance significantly. Intel is investing heavily in enabling developers to take advantage of its next-gen graphics engine for AI workloads and says we can expect a wide uptake of AI-acceleration for desktop PCs over the coming years.

Intel Gen11 Graphics

Intel's Gen11 graphics are well known. This week, the company released in-depth benchmarks to highlight the massive gen-on-gen performance gains and claims it has taken the graphics performance leadership crown from AMD's historically-leading APUs. You can read more about the Gen11 graphics architecture here, but from a high level, it bumps the number of execution units (EUs) from 24 up to 64 within the same power envelope. It also comes with a number of finer-grained improvements to the architecture that Intel says delivers one teraflop of 32-bit and two teraflops of 16-bit floating point performance in a low power envelope.

Intel says the Gen11 graphics unit features a significantly larger 3D engine to boost 1080P gaming performance above 30FPS into the 60 FPS range. The company has also improved the QuickSync video technology with dual HEVC encoders that can create and playback 4K HDR content. Gen11 is also the company's first integrated graphics unit to have adaptive sync and HDR-capable display pipes. It also supports HDR 3 and DPI 1.2.

Thunderbolt 3


Thunderbolt has had limited support in many laptops, with ports usually being located on one side due to limitations. Intel designed a new dual-sided Thunderbolt 3 controller architecture that provides up to 4 ports, two on each side of the laptop. Due to space constraints most OEMs will still ship notebooks with two ports, but there will be models with expanded capabilities on the market soon.

Intel recently contributed the Thunderbolt 3 protocol to the USB committee so it could be integrated into the USB 4 specification. That should help broaden the number of devices, in particular on the peripheral side, that support the standard.

Intel says that it expects over 30 designs, each with multiple variations, to come to market. We're still waiting on a list of the processors for further analysis, and our laptop team eagerly awaits the first devices to hit our labs.