Lenovo laptop with 10nm Intel processor appears in Chinese web store

By admin On May 14, 2018

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Intel seems to have started shipping its first 10nm processors. A Lenovo laptop has appeared on the Chinese webshop JD.com with the Core i3-8121U, a Cannon Lake-U processor without an integrated GPU.

Intel hasn’t officially announced its Core i3-8121U yet, but JD.com sells a Lenovo IdeaPad 330 laptop with that processor inside. It is a budget laptop with a price of 3299 Chinese yuan, converted about 435 euros.

Information about the Core i3-8121U has already appeared before. The frugal laptop processor of the Cannon Lake-U generation is Intel’s first 10nm chip. It is a dual core with a speed of 2.2GHz with HyperThreading. The turbo speed is 3.1GHz according to ComputerBase.

Because the processor has no igpu, a separate graphics chip must be used. Lenovo puts a Radeon RX 540 video card with 2GB vram in the laptop. That combination of Core i3 and Radeon RX 540 will probably also end up in a new Intel NUC. Perhaps the combination of the Intel processor and the AMD GPU is a standard configuration, which will appear in more laptops.

The Lenovo IdeaPad 330, which contains the 10nm processor, is a budget model with a 15.6 “tn panel with a resolution of 1366×768 pixels. Depending on the configuration, there is 4 or 8GB of DDR4 memory in the laptop and a 500GB – or a 1TB HDD, with a 128GB or 256GB SSD.

The fact that a manufacturer sells hardware with a 10nm processor from Intel indicates that the chip manufacturer has its new process ready. Intel has been making its processors on a 14nm process since 2014 and although that process has continued to improve in the following years, there has been no move to a smaller process so far.

Earlier this year, Intel itself indicated that mass production of 10nm processors will not start until next year. The process probably still needs to be optimized. The Core i3-dualcore with disabled GPU is relatively easy to make. Intel also considers that chip to be the eighth generation of processors, just like the current Coffee Lake processors.