Intel yesterday announced its 10th-generation Ice Lake chips, likely to see their Apple debut in next year’s MacBook Pro models.
Six of the new chips are of the class used in the 13-inch MacBook Pro and look set to offer dramatically improved performance in video encoding in particular…
Plus Ice Lake chips support Wi-Fi 6.
The only bad news is the chips won’t hit the market until the last quarter of the year, meaning we likely won’t see them in the anticipated 16-inch MacBook Pro this year.
On the graphics side, Intel’s 10th-generation processors deliver incredible gains. In several synthetic benchmark tests, the new Ice Lake chips delivered around double the performance of the Whiskey Lake generation, and even managed to get close to ultra-low-power GeForce MX 510 running at a 10-watt configuration.
All of the new Ice Lake processors include Wi-Fi 6 support. That’s the Gig+ speed standard formally known as 802.11ax, for which home routers are just now trickling out. If Apple doesn’t supplant Intel’s own Wi-Fi hardware with a chip with a separate networking chip, we can expect high-performance, future-proof Wi-Fi.
MacDailyNews Take: Just in time for Apple’s new Pro Display XDR monitors!
These chips have a lot going on besides video:
10nm geometry (by the way, TSMC [the people who make ARM chips] would call this 7nm if it were their geometry — that’s what they do]),
VNNI (DSP-like) instructions (aka “Deep Learning Boost”),
Support for LPDDR4 which is important for laptops,
AVX-512 (can process blocks of 512-bit data (e.g. 16 32-bit words) at once (might not be available on all chips).
Which are “of the class” that currently powers the 15″ MBPs, and which look like candidates for the rumored 16″…?
(*If any)
Intel: “No, no Apple. Wait for me; This time it’s for real! Really!