Is 10nm Better Than 14nm?
It was used in a single Lenovo laptop plus a small handful of NUCs.
Because of its low-end specs, it never saw much traction.
There are many more SKUs available and we’re already seeing decent uptake in the market across ultraportable laptops.
These are all designed for low-power ultraportables and other mobile devices, at least for now.
Intel’s naming scheme is confusing as usual.
Before Intel used U suffixes to denote 15W products, and Y to denote 9W.
All 15W products get a 5 in the fourth digit, and 9W parts get a 0.
What has become clearer this generation though, is the integrated graphics capabilities.
And it’s a much needed change.
This really is the key benefit to getting Ice Lake over previous generations.
There are also significant changes on the CPU front, thanks to an all-new CPU core in Sunny Cove.
Take the flagship 15W part that we’re looking at today: the Core i7-1065G7.
It gets the full 64 execution unit experience, giving us all the benefits of Gen11 graphics.
This is well below what you get with Intel’s other current-generation CPU, Comet Lake.
The laptop also includes a discrete GPU, Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1650 Max-Q.
The Core i7-1065G7 sits among the Core i5-10210U and Core i7-8565U towards the bottom of the charts.
Looking at clock speeds, there aren’t too many surprises given our rated clock speed discussion earlier.
Given boost clocks for mobile parts, that seems like it might be tricky.
Would it even be as efficient at these frequencies?
Would it improve performance?
Let’s look at some more benchmarks.
Single thread performance is very good as we saw previously.
In anything multi-threaded like this there just aren’t many gains to be had from Intel’s 10nm process.
It’s not all bad for Ice Lake though.
What about another good result for Ice Lake?
In Adobe Photoshop’s Iris Blur filter we see strong performance out of the Core i7-1065G7.
That is only provided by the six-core 10710U, which matches the performance of the 1065G7 at 25W.
7-zip continues the story we’ve been showing for a while now.
13 percent gains here over 10th-gen is very decent.
What about Adobe PDF exporting, which is another single-threaded task?
Ice Lake performs well here, like we’ve seen in other 1T workloads.
Our new Premiere benchmark is a prime example of this.
Pairing a 10210U with an MX250 for example, is much faster, although consumes a lot more power.
Similar gains are available with Photoshop’s Smart Sharpen filter, which is also run on the GPU.
The Core i7-1065G7 delivers roughly equivalent multi-threaded CPU performance to the Core i5-10210U.
So when comparing quad-cores on Intel’s 10nm and 14nm nodes, basically nothing has been gained here.
In general, it’s fair to say performance is about even.
And it’s similar comparing the Core i7-1065G7 to the Whiskey Lake Core i7-8565U.
On the other hand, Ice Lake is clearly much faster when you need GPU acceleration.
And that’s all within the same 15W power envelope.
In a mixed workload like Premiere, that can lead to huge performance improvements.
Overall, our early impressions on Intel’s Ice Lake processor are mixed.
Getting no improvement to multi-threaded performance is concerning for Intel’s new 10nm node.
Lower clock speeds, higher IPC, same power, same performance.
This is more about Intel bringing their part up to a competitive graphics standpoint.
If you bought an 8th-gen laptop with an MX150, Ice Lake won’t be much of an upgrade.
Where you will see gains is in laptops that don’t use a discrete GPU.
