Intel Charts A New Course With 10th Gen Core And Project Athena

From Forbes: Intel is in the midst of a reinvention process, marked by a few missteps from the company on the manufacturing side and a change of leadership at the top. The company recently exited the 5G smartphone modem business and attempting to get back on track with its 10nm manufacturing process node. Intel is also facing competitive pressure from multiple fronts, which it hasn’t experienced in quite some time. But as anyone in the industry will acknowledge, competition usually encourages companies to step up and let go of the old way of doing things. Let’s take a look at the ways Intel is attempting to bounce back.

Ice Lake is finally here

Likely the most anticipated product that Intel revealed at Computex was its 10th Gen Core processors code-named Ice Lake. These 10th Gen Core processors utilize a new Sunny Cove CPU architecture and are built with Intel’s much awaited 10nm process node, which previously had some issues regarding yields that Intel claims are now resolved. Intel says these issues are behind them and that we can see volume production of 10nm with this 10th Gen of Core processors. These new Ice Lake processors also feature the new Gen11 graphics chip, which should elevate Intel’s performance in integrated graphics further to enable even better entry-level gaming. The 10th Gen Core processors announced at Computex range from Core i3 up to Core i7, with up to 4 cores and 4.1 GHz max turbo frequency. These processors target 2-in-1 and thin and light laptop form factors, so having a 4.1 GHz max turbo frequency AND 1.1 GHz GPU frequency is quite impressive.

Intel claims the Iris Plus graphics inside of the 10th Gen core processors (based on their Gen11 graphics) provide double the performance over the previous generation in some benchmarks. The company also claims double the HEVC encode performance, which should help with creative people wanting to do on-the-go video editing. Additionally, Intel claims double the FPS in 1080P games. While this would obviously be a pretty significant improvement, it will likely depend heavily on how the thermals are managed by the device manufacturer and over what period.

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