Intel launches 10th-gen ‘Ice Lake’ chips, pushing hard on graphics for notebook PCs

Intel’s eleven new Ice Lake chips are betting big on graphics. Intel claims that its new 10th-gen Core family, launched at the start of August, will offer the best integrated graphics experience of any thin-and-light notebook PC—about equaling what some discrete chips offer in PCWorld tests.

Intel began setting up Ice Lake expectations in May, positioning its first mass-market 10nm parts as improvements for the notebook PC as a whole, including AI, communications, and I/O. The overarching message is “new”: a new process technology, a new CPU core, and a new graphics engine, along with “new” advancements in communications and I/O.

Here are Intel’s mobile Ice Lake chips, in a nutshell: 11 processors, most sporting 4 cores and 8 threads, in either a 9W, 15W, or 28W power tier. Base frequencies begin at 700MHz and climb to 2.3GHz, while single-clock turbo frequencies top) to demonstrate how Ice Lake delivers graphic performance on a par with the lowest tier of discrete GPUs.