Intel announced at CES 2019 that the chipmaker's 10nm Ice Lake processors will arrive sometime this year. So it's no wonder that the new chips have already started popping up, such as in SiSoftware's Sandra and Primate Labs' Geekbench databases.
Releasing new benchmarks in the wake of a competitors announcements, or in the coming days before big launches, is standard fare in the semiconductor industry: What better way to build hype or steal your competitors' thunder? As such, some might opine that these "leaked" benchmarks are an attempt to steer the conversation, and perhaps some dollars, to Intel's upcoming 10nm processors.
Ice Lake With Double The L2 Cache
Ice Lake processors are based around the Sunny Cove architecture. The chips are expected to be fabricated with Intel's second-generation 10nm (10nm+) manufacturing process. According to the chipmaker, Ice Lake should bring some very interesting features to the table, such as native Thunderbolt 3 support, Wi-Fi 6 (also known as 802.11ax) support, an updated Gen11 graphics solution and DL (deep learning) Boost.
According to one of the latest Geekbench leaks, Ice Lake reportedly features an increased L1 cache and twice the L2 cache per core. The quad-core Ice Lake chip from the Geekbench entry shows an L1 cache that has been bumped up to 48KB and the L2 cache doubled to 512KB. In recent years, Intel processors have been maintaining the 32KB per L1 cache and 128KB per L2 cache configurations from the Core 2 and Nehalem days, respectively. It would be good to see Intel finally give its processors a deserved cache upgrade.
The quad-core, eight-thread processor also exhibited a base clock in the range of 1.9GHz and a boost clock up to 2.29GHz. The chip is probably an engineering sample (ES), so there's still room for further tuning.
Ice Lake With Decent Gen11 Graphics
The upcoming Ice Lake processors will utilize the latest Gen11 integrated graphics engine. Gen11 will stick to the GT2 configuration and feature up to 64 execution units (EUs). It's slated to deliver over one TFLOP of performance and open the door to gaming without a discrete graphics card. It's a little too early to know for sure, but we expect Gen11 to perform in the ballpark of AMD's Radeon Vega 8 Graphics processor, which pumps out around 1.12 TFLOPs of performance.
| Row 0 - Cell 0 | CPU 1 | CPU 2 | CPU 3 | CPU 4 | CPU 5 | CPU 6 | CPU 7 |
| Shaders | 544 | 512 | 448 | 384 | 288 | 256 | 192 |
| Execution Units | 68 | 64 | 56 | 48 | 36 | 32 | 24 |
| L2 Cache | 1.3MB | 1MB | 1MB | 768KB | 1MB | 768KB | 768KB |
| Frequency | 600 MHz | 600 MHz | 1,000 MHz | 1,000 MHz | 700 MHz | 600 MHz | 900 MHz |
Up to this moment, seven configurations of the Gen11 have been spotted at SiSoftware's Official Live Ranker. The Ice Lake-U (ICL-U) processors are characterized by their ultra-low power consumption. The different Gen11 entries also carry the LP acronym, which typically stands for low-powered. The Gen11 variants include configurations from 24 up to 64 EUs. Strangely, there's a model with 68 EUs. The amount of L2 cache ranges from 768KB to 1.3MB, and the speeds range from 600MHz to 1,000MHz.
