Intel announces Cannon Lake on track & Ice Lake has taped in

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Taped in - not out. Right, so we have Kaby Lake-X, Skylake-X pending release soon, then Coffee lake. However Cannon lake is on track and Ice Lake has taped in, Intel tweeted. It's how Intel communicates these days, god forbid they actually contact press.



So Ice Lake would be the second gen 10nm processors, Cannon Lake being the first. On twitter Intel calls it "another milestone". Perhaps I need to explain what a tape-in is first. A tape-in is the second to last design stage for a chip. Basically the building blocks of the design are finished in the last design stages, these can then be combined for the final step, a tape-out. A tape-out is the stage where the physical production of the initial engineering batch wafer samples start - followed by volume production.

The production of Cannon lake would commence late this year with the first (10nm) processors becoming available in early 2018. At least that is the plan as it is right now. 10nm chips is once again an evolutionary step smaller and more energy efficient. The Cannon Lake generation will end up as U- and Y series chips for laptops. In the second half of 2018 you'd then see desktop processors based on ... 10nm Ice Lake.

You will have noticed that I did not mention Coffee lake just yet .. well say no more, Coffee Lake is based on a 14nm fabrication node and would see a release in August or September with desktop version in a 4-core and 6-core model. It is rumored to be 15% faster compared to Kaby Lake. These would be tied towards the H370 and Z370 chipsets, and you guess it .. it will have a new socket. Obviously Intel will release K models (unlocked) in the Coffee Lake generation. In Q1 2018 Coffee Lake-S would see the light of day, these are dual-core parts. 

You'll notice the slide also mentioning Gemini lake :) That is a low energy part that would follow up Apollo Lake (NAS Celerons etc) with HDMI 2.0 bringing UHS and HDR to the table. Gemini Lake TDP is 6W mobile / 10W desktop. Dual and quad core up to 18 EU Gen9, native HDMI 2.0. Gemini Lake features Goldmont Plus core, 4MB cache (up from 2MB), DDR4, integrated WiFi / BT.

Your eyes just popped out didn't they? Thanks SH SOTN for the heads up ;)


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