Intel's 10nm Cannon Lake and Core i3-8121U Deep Dive Review

[harlan4096]

Anyone interested in leading edge semiconductors knows that Intel is late with its newest manufacturing process. The '10nm' node was first announced in 2014, to be released in 2016. While officially 'shipping for revenue' by 31 December 2017, the only way we knew to get hold of an Intel 10nm x86 CPU was if you happened to be a Chinese school and work with a specific distributor to buy a specific laptop.We pulled in a few favors from within the industry and managed to source the laptop for review. 

Intel's Sole 10nm Processor

The single processor from Intel built on 10nm falls under the Core 8th generation family, and is called the Core i3-8121U. The cores are built with Intel's Cannon Lake microarchitecture, a variant of the Skylake architecture built on 14nm, and it is manufactured as a dual core with integrated graphics. The part nominally has a standard 'GT2' graphics configuration, but is actually shipped without the graphics enabled - some analysts believe that this is because it doesn't work (see more on the next page). Norminally this is a 2+2 design (two cores, GT2 graphics), however it might also be referred to as a 2+0 design.

The two cores run at a 2.2 GHz base frequency at 15W thermal design power, and offers a 3.2 GHz turbo frequency. Memory support includes LPDDR4, one of very few Intel processors to do so, but also this processor has AVX-512 capabilities, allowing it to process vector math much like Intel's Enterprise class hardware but now in a low end chip. We'll dive deep into all these points in this review.

What Do We Have

The sole laptop which has an Intel Core i3-8121U inside is a specific model of the Chinese Lenovo Ideapad E330-15ICN.

Full reading: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13405/int...ive-review