According to a report by AnandTech, Intel may be preparing to announce their upcoming eight-generation processors on August 21st, but it seems like the company has already announced its ninth-generation Ice Lake chips rather early.
This is a bit of an unusual move on Intel’s part. Currently, Intel has the Kaby Lake processors that use the second-generation 14nm process. The third generation of the 14nm process is to be used by the upcoming Coffee Lake architecture. Cannon Lake hasn’t been officially announced yet, but will most likely use Intel’s first-generation process on 10nm scale.
What’s more interesting is that Ice Lake throws things out of wack. Intel said that it was a succesor to the 8th-gen Intel Core processors. It seems that Intel is getting ahead of itself by jumping the first-generation and moving into the second one. This does seem a bit puzzling and confusing.
AnandTech states that the skip is due to the way Cannon Lake’s 10nm chips are being infused together as the Coffee Lake 14nm++ line. This is for laptops at some point. FOr desktops, it will jump straight from Kaby Lake’s 14nm+ to Coffee Lake’s 14nm++ to Ice Lake’s 10nm+.
We currently don’t know why Intel would split the laptop and desktop procesor lines. AnandTech speculates that it’s more related to technical aspects of the chip design process.
