In all previous discussions about the Ryzen processors, it was about overturning an equally important announcement: the new generation of Intel processors in the form of Ice Lake architecture. Unfortunately, these processors are not dedicated to the desktop, only portable platforms.

Intel promises that its new architecture will bring an 18% performance increase at the same frequency as Skylake, something that may not sound too impressive, but it must be stressed that we are talking about laptop processors. And besides that additional performance percentage, the Ice Lake architecture also comes with a 2.5% times increase for AI tasks, which are more important for a mobile platform at this time than for a PC. At the same time, Skylake is a four-year-old architecture, and Ice Lake is also made on 10 nanometers, so the ad does not manage to spell a wait.

The only models announced for the time being are i3, i5 and i7, with a TDP ranging from 9W to 28W, having up to 4 physical and 8 threads, with frequencies up to 4.1GHz. This is not exactly impressive, since Intel already offers 6-core and 12-threads processors with a 45W TDP at the same maximum frequency.

However, the new Ice Lake Series processors still have advantages. They have built-in support for the Thunderbolt, they allow the use of 3733MHz DDR4 memory as standard, and the 11th generation graphics promises to be high performance, supporting as standard the 5K resolution of 60Hz. It even comes with a hardware encoder for HEVC twice as fast as the one in the previous generation, good news for those who used Intel Quick-Sync for video encoding.

These processors will be available in a variety of systems this year, but an exact date has bot been mentioned yet but we can expect them to be unveiled late on Q3, or early Q4 of this year.