CES 2019: Intel demos 10nm Ice Lake CPU and promises shipments later this year

Ice Lake will feature Sunny Cove microarchitecture in first major upgrade since 2015's Skylake

Intel has demonstrated a 10nm Ice Lake CPU based on its upcoming Sunny Cove microarchitecture at the CES 2019 trade show in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Sunny Cove is the first major revision to Intel's CPU microarchitecture since Skylake, introduced in 2015, a revision that ought to offer a significant improvement in instructions per cycle (IPC) in single-core operation.

Intel had originally promised its first 10nm CPUs before the end of 2015, but manufacturing challenges has seen it repeatedly delayed, as rival foundries operated by TSMC and Samsung have shifted to 7nm and are already looking to 5nm process architectures for 2020.

Sunny Cove will feature increased cache sizes, with cores capable of executing more operations in parallel. As such, the CPUs ought to offer a significant bump-up in performance. Intel has touted Ice Lake CPUs for running AI and machine learning applications.

However, software may need to be recompiled in order to take full advantage of the new microarchitecture. Furthermore, PCs and laptops bearing Ice Lake still might not appear in volume on retailers' shelves before the end of the year, although Intel has promised a plentiful supply in time for Christmas.

While specifics have not yet been announced, Intel's Gregory Bryant confirmed that the chips will be the first to ship with Gen11 integrated graphics, which Intel claims is "designed to break the 1 TFLOPS barrier", alongside built-in Thunderbolt 3, WiFi 6 (802.11ax) and DL boost (deep learning boost) support.

At the same CES 2019 event, Intel previewed Lakefield, a mobile processor based on the company's new Foveros 3D packaging technology. The integrated system-on-a-chip (SoC) has five cores and pairs a 10nm high-performance Sunny Cove core with four Intel Atom-based cores.

Intel claims Lakefield, which will go into production in 2019, will enable PC manufacturers to reduce the size of their PCs even further.

The company also announced new 9th-generation Core processors and teased its first 9th-gen H-Series Core chips for notebooks for release in the second quarter of 2019.

Finally, in a bid to take on Qualcomm's 'Always Connected' Windows 10 PCs, Intel outlined a new standard for the next generation of laptops, called Project Athena.

Devices designed under Athena will, like Qualcomm's alternatives, offer always-on connectivity and power on instantly, and will be ready for next-gen technologies, such as 5G and artificial intelligence, Intel claimed.