Since Merom's 65-nm process Core 2 Duo in 2006, Intel manufacturing technology has been upgraded steadily for two or three years, but has encountered some setbacks at 10 nm. It has been five years since the first 14-nm and the fifth generation of Core Broadwell in 2014.

10nm Ice Lake is a brand new platform and the most advanced notebook platform so far.With new transistor technology and process, new CPU/GPU architecture and new platform integration technology, the new generation of notebooks will be on the shelves soon after mass supply in June.

This is the layout and main specifications of the 10nm Ice Lake CPU.From CPU to GPU, from memory to multimedia, from display output to image processing, from interconnection bus to lightning 3, are new.I'll explain them one by one.

It's matched by one.PCH chipset with 14 nm processIntegrating Wi-Fi 6 802.11ac MAC (CNVi 2) with independent radio frequency AX201, fully integrated voltage regulator, built-in programmable four-core DSP, supporting voice wake-up, providing six USB 3.1 or ten USB 2.0, 16 PCIe 3.0, three SATA 6 Gbps, eMMC 5.1.

Ice Lake is packaged with CPU and PCH dual chips. There are two types of Ice Lake according to power consumption. One is CPU and PCH dual chips.15W Type 3The thickness is 1.3 mm, 1526 balls, and the other is more compact.9W Type 41.0 mm thick, 1377 balls.

The first batch of Ice Lake processors on the mobile end is divided intoLow-power Ice Lake-U and ultra-low-power Ice Lake-Y have three sub-series of thermal design power consumption: 9W, 15W and 28W, up to four core and eight threads, the highest acceleration frequency is 4.1GHz (which is reduced on the contrary), and the maximum three-level cache is 8MB. The integrated core display is divided into Iris Plus (48/64 units) and UHD (32 units), with the maximum acceleration frequency of 1.1GHz, dual-channel DDR4-3200 (U series) and LPD4/4X-3 DR. 733.

In the CPU section, Ice Lake has a new application.Sunny Cove ArchitectureThis is also the beginning of many of Intel's future new architectures, which we have described in detail before.

Simply put, the main internal architecture units and caches of Sunny Cove architecture have been expanded, deeper and wider, and more intelligent, such as improving branch prediction accuracy, reducing effective load delay, client optimization, and so on. It also improves the performance of new encryption instructions, expands vector performance, and strengthens security features.

Intel claims that,Ice Lake IPC performance improved by an average of 18% compared with Skylake, up to 40%.But notice that this is only a comparison with the six generations of Core Rui four years ago.

In terms of actual performance,With 15W thermal design power, Ice Lake has increased its single core performance power by more than 45% compared with five generations of Core Broadwell five years ago.

GPU nuclear display improves more greatly.The number of execution units has been increased to 64 at a dramatic rate, with the highest frequency of 1.1 GHz, the highest floating point performance of 1.12 TFlops and 2.25 TFlops.At the same time, the grating can process 16 pixels per clock cycle, and the three-level buffer is also increased to 3MB.

Two fixed function units are responsible for HEVC (H.265)/VP9 video decoder (double decoder), with the highest support.4KAt the same time, three video pipelines support three-screen independent output, support DisplayPort 1.4 HBR3, HDMI 2.0b, and can output up to 5K60, 4K120 10-bit.

Intel is not enough to cope with large-scale games, but it is constantly improving the game optimization. This time, it broadens the architecture, optimizes energy efficiency, reshapes the memory subsystem, andFinally support adaptive synchronization technology of VESAThe Driver Control Center is also completely renovated and will provide synchronization support for the first time of popular games.

Intel's commitment to support adaptive synchronization technology has been in place for many years. Now it has finally been realized. Similar to AMD FreeSync, it can avoid picture tearing and carton, and it claims that frame rate can be increased by up to 80%.

Intel claims that the Iris Plus display of 48/64 units can ensure that the average frame rate of most game masterpieces exceeds 30 FPS, and some can break through 60 FPS.

Video multimedia has also made tremendous progress. For the first time, FP16 HDR display pipeline has been integrated to support HDR 10, Dolby Vision, BT.2020 and so on.

The new driver UI has been previewed in the existing version, especially for gamers. It can automatically detect hardware and set the best playability configuration. Now it supports 44 games with one-click optimization. It will be more than 400 games in the future. It can also customize the configuration of different games. There will be new driver support on the first day of large-scale games.

Linux is also progressing very fast. Now it has entered Beta testing stage. It can achieve all the functional features by the end of the third quarter, update the Gallium 3D driver by the end of the year, and performance optimization is also in progress.

Intel also places great emphasis on Ice Lake AI performance. Sunny Cove CPU joins DLBoost machine learning acceleration support, and combines GPU core and low power accelerator to fully support it.WindowsML, Intel OpenVINO, Apple CoreML and other frameworks, compared with the eight-generation Core performance can be easily improved by 2-2.5 times, compared with some competitors can be up to 8 times.

At the same time, Ice Lake CPU also added machine-based learning.Dynamic Tuning 2.0 Dynamic Adjustment TechnologyThe workload can be predicted to allow the processor to run in a higher performance state for longer periods of time without fast frequency switching.

In terms of platform integration, Lightning 3 has entered Ice Lake, and with the integration of Lightning 3 and USB 4 standards, it is also ready for the popularization of USB 4 in the future. Of course, the external output is mainly USB 3.x, PCIe, DisplayPort.

Independent and integrated thunder and lightning 3 system structure diagram, it does not matter if you do not understand it...

Intel has contributed Lightning 3 as the foundation of USB 4, realizing the ultra-high speed of 40Gbps, and there will only be a USB-C interface in the future.

Wi-Fi 6 is also part of the Ice Lake platform. It has faster speed, lower latency and larger capacity. It can enable more devices to run more stably at higher speeds, especially supporting 160MHz channel and OBSS network noise filtering, improving speed and network reliability, especially improving network performance in dense environments.