Ahead of Computex 2019, Intel had a small group attend a pre-briefing around the company’s show announcements. Intel will have its keynote on Tuesday where we will share more content around Ice Lake from a previous briefing. We are able to share some Ice Lake details today, along with a few other projects. One is that the company has a program underway to profile real application usage and deliver performance there. Another is that there is a new Intel Core i9-9900KS coming with a 5.0GHz all core turbo speed.
Intel Application Profiling
During the pre-briefing Intel shared a perspective around PC application usage that focused on what applications consumers actually use. It shared a dataset from 2015 to today and highlighted a number of applications:
The key to this is that it says the benchmarks being run (e.g. Cinebench) are not necessarily representative of real world usage. Instead, Intel is focusing on the developer community to push optimizations into the software stack to make its CPUs perform better in real application workloads.
We requested a more complete list from the exercise, but the data set encompasses over 1.8M users and shows what applications they have run at least once.
Intel Core i9-9900KS 5.0GHz All Core Turbo
One of the preview announcements was the Intel Core i9-9900KS 5.0GHz CPU. We were told that we will learn more about the CPU on Tuesday around pricing, availability, and TDP. What we know is that the CPU features eight cores and a 4.0GHz base clock with a 5.0GHz turbo clock.
During the preview, we were able to see the Intel Core i9-9900KS running live at 5GHz all core turbo:
We were told that this is a special edition processor, but not a limited edition processor which means it is not a 1 of 1000 CPU affair. Intel also confirmed that the chip would have an active iGPU. This is one that would be absolutely exciting if it were to have an Intel Xeon E counterpart.
Ice Lake Performance Preview
Ice Lake is Intel’s 10nm CPU that will be coming soon and that we will have more on later this week at STH. The company provided a quick preview of low TDP Ice Lake parts versus its current generation Whiskey Lake parts as well as AMD Ryzen 3700U series parts. One of the key thrusts that Intel is highlighting with Ice Lake is the Gen9 to Gen11 graphics performance update.
Here is the comparison with AMD Ryzen:
Intel also highlighted that Gen11 graphics will have the DirectX 12 variable shading support which yields significant improvements at a minimal quality loss.
Intel was quick to mention that the future Ice Lake Gen11 graphics are faster than AMD’s solution that has been shipping for some time.
We, of course, are awaiting what AMD is launching in 2019 to be the contemporary of Ice Lake, but if the trends hold, Intel is going to see significant generational improvement.
Overall, the company says that we will see a massive increase in performance with the new GPU that will help deliver better notebook battery performance. Specifically, Intel is saying it is working with the software ecosystem to provide optimizations for its new chips giving support for VNNI and other extensions to bring AI inferencing to the 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors down to the edge devices.
Final Words
Intel admitted this is a bit of a teaser preview for Tuesday when it will announce a range of products. The company knows that AMD and NVIDIA have events on Monday and wants to get out a bit ahead of the news. We will have a lot more on Ice Lake, the Intel Core i9-9900KS as well as other announcements on Tuesday Taiwan time. One we are expecting, a new badging coming to a laptop near you:
