Intel's traditional two-year cadence between new architectures was famously delayed for four years as the company struggled to bring its 10nm node online, but now Intel has finally whipped the covers off its 10nm 10th-Generation Core processors, codename Ice Lake, that are finally shipping.

Ice Lake's headline feature is an 18% increase in average instruction per cycle (IPC) throughput compared to the aging Skylake architecture, but the gains are even higher in some applications, with peaks in the 30 to 40% range for some types of workloads (albeit lower gains in others).

The boosted performance comes courtesy of Intel's new Sunny Cove cores and is a needed addition to help fight off the resurgent AMD, which recently touted a 15% improvement in IPC with its Zen microarchitecture on the 7nm process. AMD claims that its new third-gen Ryzen products have exceeded Intel's Skylake single-core performance, long the hallmark of Intel's dominating performance, albeit by small 1 to 3% margins. Given Intel's large step forward, it looks like the Ice Lake chips can restore Intel's performance lead.


Intel also whipped in its new Gen11 graphics engine, which Intel says will offer up to a 2X performance improvement and claims will take the performance crown from AMD's APUs. Intel has also integrated new DLBoost capabilities that offer up to a 2.5x performance with AI workloads through new vector instructions. Other enhancements, like up to four Thunderbolt 3 ports with four times the throughput of USB 3 apiece, Wi-Fi 6 with performance up to gigabit speeds, and USB-C all converge to make the Ice Lake processors a compelling platform upgrade.


The Ice Lake lineup is destined for notebooks and other thing and light devices. The chips will come in U- and Y-series variants that span the 9W, 15W and 25W TDP ranges. These 10th-generation processors will come with up to four cores and eight threads, 8BM of L3 cache, and maximum turbo frequencies of 4.1 GHz. Intel has also bumped up dual-channel memory support to 4X32 LPDDR4X-3733 and DDR4-3200, which is a big improvement to ~60 GB/s of throughput that will help boost graphics performance. The Gen11 graphics will reach up to 1.1 GHz.

Intel has declined to share a list of specific products at this time, which is a significant departure from its standard operating procedure. Intel tells us that it will share the full specifications when the products come to market, which we just learned is today. The company expects over 30 designs, each with multiple variations, to come to market.

We do know that the chips will carry 10-series branding, so the product names will be a bit confusing. Intel has signified each generation with a four-digit identifier, such as the 9th-gen core chips with a -9xxxU branding, but the 10th-gen chips bring about an extra digit, such as an 10xxxU identifier.

Ice Lake Processors

Here we can see Intel's Y- and U-series chip that operate at 9W and 15W, respectively, but Intel isn't commenting on the maximum power draw of the processors (PL2). Intel has introduced a new thin magnetic inductor array that helps the company provide greater efficiency at low power, yet still extend up the full dynamic power range when needed.


Intel also introduced Dynamic Tuning 2.0, a new machine learning-based power delivery technique that uses software running inside the operating system to adjust power dynamically based upon the users' needs. This software runs in both Windows and Linux, but it isn't clear if it comes as a standalone software package or as a driver. The big change with this new power management scheme is that it doesn't rely on pre-defined power curves that are created at the factory, instead, the system learns the users' behavior and adjusts power based on the type of workloads that are currently running.


Here we can see the various improvements that Intel has made to the design, and just how much larger the Gen11 graphics are compared to previous-gen processors. We also see that the Thunderbolt 3 implementation consumes quite a bit of display area, and that the cores are still connected via a ring bus fabric.

Sunny Cove Microarchitecture


Boosting IPC throughput by an average of 15 to 18% is a tall order that requires significant design efforts, but Intel's Sunny Cove microarchitecture delivers a wide range of improvements. Intel can now process four or six micro-ops (uops) per clock courtesy of a 50% larger micro-op cache, and the company also expanded the L1 data cache from 32KB to 48KB and doubled the L2 cache to 512KB.