Intel Releases Specs Core i3 i3-8121U and it is 10nm Cannon Lake

Those 10nm issues. Again 15W TDP and -200MHz turbo.

 

Part of me wonders if Intel has had 10nm working fine for a while now, but the problem is maybe it can't clock as high (which could also explain why clocks from AMD/GloFo haven't been all that impressive). Seeing as Intel hasn't really improved their architecture's IPC since Haswell, I'm pretty sure shrinking the die to 10nm while sacrificing clock speeds would not look like they're making progress.

However, high clock rates don't really matter in laptops. Intel could still make 10nm mobile chips, where there would only be improvements and no downsides, since high clock speeds are largely irrelevant in mobile devices.

 

I really dont undestand this chip, its a low power budget chip without GPU.
Hope to see it against a AMD Ryzen 3 2200U with same core count, roughly same MHz, same TDP and the build in Vega.

This could be a dive in the trashcan to find something to sell, because i think this is the first GPU less Intel laptop CPU, in a long time.

 

Maybe someone can clarify this for me. Would the potential limitations of smaller chips/pathways be how common or dirty the electric standards are? To me, limiting through put can make interruptions far more critical. Which could cause the limited boost and frequency ranges as of lately.

I literally have nothing to back this theory but, I'm hoping someone else does

 

I'm not sure I 100% understand what you're asking, but there are 2 things to worry about when you shrink the transistors to these sizes:
1. I get the impression that the smaller you go, there's a greater chance of impurities making something fail. Think of it like potholes in the road - if you're driving a big truck, the wheels are large enough that it won't really affect the ride much. The pothole may limit how fast you can go, but you can still drive over it. Meanwhile if you drive a Mini Cooper with those tiny wheels, that pothole could cause some serious damage when going at the same speed as the truck.
2. Quantum tunneling (where electrons start passing through transistors even when the gate is supposed to be closed). To my understanding, the higher the voltage, the more likely this problem will occur. But, voltage tends to correlate to frequency. So, as you can imagine, frequency has to be limited to sustain stability.

As far as I'm aware, the cleanliness of the voltage source itself isn't much of an issue. Modern VRMs are pretty accurate and go through multiple phases.

 

I think most of the reason for the fairly low frequencies, is the jump in number of cores while keeping the TDP relatively low.
Ryzen and Vega really likes low frequencies and you start to face a wall if you push them hard, Intel and Nvidia does not have the very steep curve and runs better at high frequencies.
The switching losses in the chips get higher the faster the CPU runs, so i dont think we will se much higher then 5GHz for a long time in the future, i think the future is faster cache, memory, more work per clock and lower power.

 

It's not mainstream. It's a niche product. Mainstream i3 CNL-U are likely to be 9100 and 9006.

 

Very well could be from the trash can, intel sampled this silicon in late 2016 , it was supposed to launch mid 2017..... , probably have a lot of left over chips from the first retail production run.

well that or this is all they could muster after a year.

not looking good eitherway.

 

Yeh Intel really could be in trouble if 10nm yields/performance aren't up to scratch although 8700K and 8600K still the best choices for gaming at 1080p.
Zen2 on 7nm, let's say it can clock to 5GHz on a golden chip...Intel might start to look a bit scared and confused...