After flunking plans for 10nm Coffee Lake, Intel promises 9th-gen Ice Lake CPUs will go 10nm
Ice Lake probably won't appear before 2019 at the earliest
Intel has promised that the successor to its 8th generation Core microprocessors, code-named Ice Lake, will be built on the 10nm manufacturing process that the imminently available Coffee Lake CPUs ought to have been built on.
In a vague teaser, which Intel has posted just days before it will unveil its 8th-gen processors, if claimed that the next-gen parts will offer "amazing performance and responsiveness".
It continues: "The Ice Lake processor family is a successor to the 8th generation Intel Core processor family. These processors utilize Intel's industry-leading 10nm+ process technology."
Intel doesn't specify what the plus sign in "10nm+" means, but it likely means that users can expect a performance and battery life boost over the firm's upcoming Cannon Lake CPUs, which will be the first time Intel drops to 10nm - a shift that had been planned for Coffee Lake, but put back due to manufacturing challenges.
Back in February, Intel said that its first Cannon Lake CPUs would launch in the second half of this year and promised that the 10nm chips would offer a "15 per cent performance boost" over its yet-to-be-announced predecessor.
Before the launch of Intel's first 10nm chips, the firm will next week launch its 8th-gen Coffee Lake processors, which will be remain on 14nm despite increased pressure from AMD's Ryzen line up, which has already seen AMD start to claw back market share from its main rival.
It is unlikely that the impending unveiling will contain too many surprises, though, as alleged specifications for Intel's Coffee Lake CPUs appeared online last month.
If legitimate, expect Intel to offer a trio of six-core, 12-thread devices, with a leaked CPU-Z screenshot of an engineering sample suggesting they will slot into Intel's standard LGA1151 socket. The leak also indicated a part with a 3.5GHz base clock speed, but capable of boosting to 4.3GHz on at least one core, and a 12MB level-3 cache.
All three parts will support DDR4 with a 2,400MHz integrated memory controller frequency. Only the cheaper of the three parts will not offer DDR overclocking.
While this is mostly speculation, Intel has publicly claimed that its Coffee Lake processors will be 15 to 30 per cent faster than its previous generation Kaby Lake chips.
It's unclear when Ice Lake will be making its debut, but Motley Fool reports that it is unlikely that they will appear before 2019.
According to a leaked roadmap from January, 'Tiger Lake' will be the successor to Intel's 10nm+ Ice Lake processors.