Intel Launches 10th-Gen ‘Ice Lake' Chips, Pushing Hard On Graphics For Notebook PCs

If you already own a Matebook or Matebook Pro, or are eyeing one on Amazon, here’s what you need to know

- Mark Hachman

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 (go.pcworld.com/icla), 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 out at 4.1GHz. Graphics frequencies will hover right around 1GHz, with 32, 48, and 64 EUs differentiating performance. We also have real-world testing data (go.pcworld.com/ilpf) to demonstrate how Ice Lake delivers graphic performance on a par with the lowest tier of discrete GPUs.

A bit of sticker shock, however, may affect how some perceive Ice Lake. Most 10th-gen

Ice Lake base clock speeds fall short of their existing 8th-gen Whiskey Lake counterparts. Some of the new Ice Lake low-power chips offer base clocks of less than 1GHz. Versions of Ice Lake designed for tablets now consume 9 watts, rather than the 5 watts of their predecessors, Amber Lake.