At CES 2019, the chipmaker Intel held a press conference, announcing that they now have 10nm CPUs in production. Intel has had problems with 10nm for a long time but it seems that they have finally solved the problems.
At CES, they introduced Intel Ice Lake, the latest CPUs with 10nm. The first set of CPUs will be in the U-series, targeting laptops, with more powerful CPUs coming later this year.
Intel Ice Lake is said to perform quite a lot better than the old Skylake-CPUs and it comes with a larger cache which will give more performance per core. Ice Lake also get new features like Thunderbolt 3 support as well as WiFi 6, the new WiFi standard that is on the horizon.
Ice Lake will be rolled out during the year so we’ll see when we can put one of these chips in a gaming rig.
Intel also announced that they will be expanding their 9th generation CPUs to the more budget-friendly territory.
Over the past couple of months, we have been able to buy the balls to the wall’s CPU i9-9900K but now, a few more CPUs for Mobile (laptops, etc) is released with the first CPU coming this month, other coming later in Q2.
Lakefield
Lakefield was also something that Intel talked about. Lakefield is the official name for the chips that are using the company’s new technology Foveros.
This technology gives Intel the possibility to make a chip that is much smaller than traditional CPUs. The reason for this is that components that used to be separate in a CPU can now be paced together, on a smaller surface.
With the technology, Intel can use vertical space as well and not just the flat board as current CPUs do.
This will enable manufacturers to create thinner laptops that are just, or more, as powerful as laptops today.
Personally, I don’t think that CPUs are that exciting anymore, we have had the big leaps and for gaming and general use, a new CPU will not be that noticeable.
However, I am happy to take smaller laptops any day of the week. It will be interesting to see the products that are being made because of this new tech from Intel.
