Intel Cannon Lake release date, news, and rumors
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Remember howIntelwas going to release Cannon Lake in 2016? And, then when it got pushed back to 2018? Well, according toIntel’s Q1 financial results, we won’t see the long-awaitedfollow-up to Kaby Lake until 2019– at least in a consumer-ready state.
Before we get into Cannon Lake, we’re going to have to dive into its background, because it gets messy. You see, in the past, Intel has followed a simple ‘Tick Tock’ release schedule, where each generation would alternate between introducing a new die process and architecture. This is why we all expected Cannon Lake to succeed Skylake way back in 2016.
Reality is never quite so simple. Intel has repeatedly pushed Cannon Lake, and the rest of its 10nm silicon, back. Since Skylake, Intel has launchedKaby Lake,Coffee LakeandCoffee Lake Refresh, three more refinements of the 14nm process. We’re not even sure when Intel will release Cannon Lake, if it ever does. This delay of releasing consumer-focused 10nm processors may actually explain whyAMDhas claimed more than half of the CPU market.
But, at leastIntel is sticking to a 2019 release datefor its 10nm Ice Lake chips for laptops.
Intel keeps denying thatCannon Lake is canceled, but withIce Lakeappearing in the very release window we assumed Cannon Lake would have, it’s hard to believe. Plus, Intel has revealedSunny Coveas its next architecture. Still, wedidget aCannon Lakelaptop chip, so we’ll keep trying to figure out what Intel is doing. So, be sure to keep this page bookmarked and we’ll update it with any new Cannon Lake information.
Cut to the Chase
Release date
We were supposed to get Cannon Lake twice already. The presumably 9th-generation Intel CPUs were initially supposed to follow Skylake in 2016, thenKaby Lakein 2018. But according toIntel’s Q1 2018 financial report, it’s “currently shipping low-volume 10nm product and now expects 10nm volume production to shift to 2019.” So, we’re probably not getting Cannon Lake in 2018.
There was some recent speculation that pointed to Intel just cancelling Cannon Lake, because it wasn’t financially feasible to shift to 10nm. However,Intel came out and defended itself, saying that it was ‘making good progress on 10nm’ and that ‘yields are improving’. So, we just have to see when this smaller manufacturing process makes it to market.
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But, then we keep getting more and more evidence that Cannon Lake might never see the light of day. Intel just announced itsSunny Cove 10nm microarchitecture, for both server and client processors, for release in late 2019. So, is Sunny Cove just Cannon Lake rebranded? Is Cannon Lake cancelled? Who knows.
Either way we’ll have to waituntil at least 2019to see Cannon Lake, or whatever it’s called now, but when in 2019? Well, we don’t know yet, but we did get our hands on a leaked Intel roadmap that showsCoffee Lake Refreshbeing Intel’s main platform through Q2 2019. But, given Intel’srecent supply issues, we could see the release pushed back to the latter half of 2019 or even 2020.
Price
Intel probably isn’t going to rock the boat too much here. We expect prices to fall in line with the current lineup of 8th-generationCoffee Lakeprocessors. We’ve taken the liberty of listing some of the prices here.
Unfortunately, we won’t know until Intel actually releases pricing information, but between generations, Intel doesn’t generally shift its pricing all that much.
Specs
This is where things are going to get interesting. It’s been a very long time since we’ve seen a die process shrink at Intel, but whenBroadwell succeeded Haswell(yeah, it’s been that long), we saw 30% gains in efficiency. This will mean that battery life in the best laptops will surge, and we’ll be able to overclock even harder while keeping temps manageable.
Tom’s Hardware has reportedthat a dual-core Cannon Lake CPU was shipped last year according to a Spectre microcode guidance document, but it’s highly unlikely that consumer units will be the same. Otherwise, AMD would eat them alive for that. We’ll likely see higher core counts, as Intel is going to want to go up against AMD in a major way.
This dual-core chip was likely thatIntel Core i3 8121Uprocessor that was just listed by Intel. According to the product listing the processor features two-cores and four-threads delivering 2.2GHz of base performance and boost clock of 3.2GHz. It also has a TDP of just 15W and a 4MB cache.
And,Anandtechseems to have got its hands on a laptop running that Core i3-8121U for testing – and, well, it’s not the next-generation revolution you were expecting. It beat the Kaby Lake Intel Core i3-8130U in some benchmarks, but many of the tests put the Cannon Lake mobile chip behind in power, while consuming more power.
We’ve also seen a leaked document thatsuggests a new X399 chipsetin the works that would support existingCoffee LakeCPUs and possibly Cannon Lake processors as well, suggesting enthusiasts won’t need to upgrade their motherboard to get on the Cannon Lake train.
If the newly-announcedIntel i7-8086Kis any kind of clue as to what we can expect from future Intel products with its 5GHz boost clock, we won’t only see high core counts as a result of the move to a 10nm process, but crazy high clock speeds as well.
Ultimately, we won’t know what performance advantages Cannon Lake CPUs will offer until Intel shares some more information about it, but because it’s been pushed back until 2019. It’s likely we won’t hear anything from the tech behemoth until Computex 2019. But, don’t worry if anything changes, we’ll update this page. So, keep your eyes glued to this page.
Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN. Previously, she was TechRadar’s US computing editor. She is fat, queer and extremely online. Computers are the devil, but she just happens to be a satanist. If you need to know anything about computing components, PC gaming or the best laptop on the market, don’t be afraid to drop her a line on Twitter or through email.
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