It’s been almost half a year since Intel launched its 10th-gen Core “Ice Lake” line of processors, and since then we’ve seen a handful of laptops with 15-watt Ice lake-U series processors.
What we haven’t seen yet are any systems powered by the highest-performance Ice Lake chip — the 28 watt Intel Core i7-1068G7. PCs with low-power Intel Ice Lake Y processors have also been notably absent. But Intel says they’re on the way.
The folks at at AnandTech checked in with Intel on the status of the not-yet-available Ice Lake chips and received confirmation that:
- The 28-watt Intel Core i7-1068G7 will be available to PC makers in the first quarter of 2020.
- PCs with 9-12 watt Intel Ice Lake Y-series processors should be available int he first half of 2020.
It’s worth noting that no PC makers actually showed off designs with either of these processors at the Consumer Electronics Show, which suggests that they may not be very close to launching.
Anyway, the Core i7-1068G7 processor is the most powerful member of the Ice Lake family, with a 2.3 GHz base frequency, support for single-core boost speeds up to 4.1 GHz or speeds up to 3.6 GHz when all 4 cores (and 8 threads) are firing.
The G7 in the name also indicates that this is a chip with Intel Iris Plus graphics featuring 64 execution units. That means these chips have the best integrated GPU technology Intel has to offer… at least until the company’s Tiger Lake processors with integrated Intel Xe graphics come along later this year.
As for the upcoming Y-series processors, they’re a bit more power hungry than Intel’s current-gen “Amber Lake Y” processors, which tend to use around 5-7 watts. But that should help them reduce the performance gap between Y and U-series processors. And top-of-the-line 10th-gen Core Y-series Ice Lake processors such as the Intel Core i5-1030G7 and Core i7-1060G7 feature the same Iris Plus/64 EU graphics as the Core i7-1068G7… although the lower power envelope likely means performance won’t be quite as good.
Y-series processors are often used for small, energy-efficient and/or fanless devices like the GPD Win line of gaming handheld computers or thin and light tablets (like some Microsoft Surface models).
How exactly does the 64EU Iris Plus G7 compare to the 72EU Iris Pro 580 (with 128MB DRAM cache)?
Brad, I don’t suppose you have any concrete information about Y series laptops coming up? I’ve been following CES for just this, and I’m alarmed that none have been announced.
Can the new Y series be configured for lower TDP? I wonder how the performance will compare with the previous generation. Hoping to see some new handheld UMPCs this year.
Pretty sure they can. The Y series have some of the widest tolerances on the lower end. But cooling has also improved in newer chassis designs, so the increasing in TDP shouldn’t be too alarming.
My main beef is that AMD hasn’t produced anything in the class. I would have loved a Ryzen 4000 Y.
Give them time. They are a much smaller company than Intel, and Intel’s research budget is many times that of AMD’s. Judging from the number of design wins they’re expecting for their Ryzen 4000 mobile chips, they’re on the right path. Given them another year or two to flesh out their mobile lineup.
I very much want to. I mean, I hope I don’t need to replace my current Y series laptop until AMD comes out with something like the bonkers 4800U but in the Y category.
One concer is that by the time AMD gets round to the end of the market, it will have already been taken over by ARM. Which would be fine except for the fact that I am a Linux user, and ARM is going to be quite a bit more dicey than 64_x86.
TLDR: competition is great and everything, but now I’m confused about platorms and instructions sets. Not a fun place to be for a random Joe Shmoe.
We’re still many years away from ARM taking over the laptop market, whereas AMD is maybe one or two years away from offering the product you want.
I will be part of a group of hobbyists working with ARM laptops in Linux. It’s getting better but isn’t great yet. Especially outside toy operating systems, there is still a lot of tinkering as was once required to get linux distros running on x86 hardware in 2007.
I anticipate ARM laptops being competitive in 2025, but that’s the wild guess of a person who doesn’t touch hardware or software development.
Rough.
Given that we have something like the Pinebook Pro already, I would have thought we’d be farther along. But after a quick lookup on the state of support on the Snapdragon laptops that came out in the last couple of years, you’re probably right.
There are Mediatek and Rockchip chromebooks with ARM SOCs. They have been around for a long time. The main hold-up for ARM is the competition with GPUs. Discrete graphics on x86 is much higher performance (and higher power too) compared to ARM.
Which one of these would fit in a new MacBook Pro 13? The 28W?
Assuming that’s the case, how much RAM does it support, 32GB or 64GB?
Wikichip says 64GB
28W sounds like a lot for a small macbook. More realistically, up to the 15W i7.
And 64gb ram should be supported by the processor, if there’s the physical space and connectors to install it.