Macworld - USA (2019-09)

14 MACWORLD OCTOBER 2019

MACUSER INTEL’S ICE LAKE CHIPS AND THE MACBOOK

vector operations,
as well as larger
caches and
buffers.
Intel says to
expect an overall
18 percent
improvement in
instructions-per-
clock (IPC) across
a wide variety of
tasks, but
encryption, video
compression, and machine learning tasks
should execute a lot faster.
Before you get all excited about the
next round of MacBooks being 18 percent
faster than the ones sold today (and much
more in select tasks), get ready for some
bad news. That big IPC boost is somewhat

offset by the fact that these

10th-generation chips have significantly

lower base and boost clocks than the

Amber Lake and Coffee Lake-U chips they

are replacing.

It’s hard to get an exact picture of how

well these chips will perform in a

MacBook Air or

13-inch MacBook

Pro. So much of

laptop processor

design is

constrained by

thermal design

and the nature of

the workload;

short and “bursty”

so that high turbo

speeds can be

maintained, or

long sustained

Intel’s model numbers are getting no easier to decipher. Apple tends to

hide these details, anyway.

In many tasks, Ice Lake is just a little bit faster. But encryption and
compression tasks get a big performance boost.

0 200 400 600 800 1,

SDS Core i7-1065G7 10th Gen Ice

Lake U 25 Watt (4/8)

HP Spectre x360 13 8th Gen Core

i7-8565U Whisky Lake U (4/8)

SDS Core i7-1065G7 10th Gen Ice

Lake U 15 Watt (4/8)

Dell XPS 13 9380 8th Gen Core

i7-8565U Whisky Lake U (4/8)

HANDBRAKE 7/29 NIGHTLY H.

QUICKSYNC ENCODE (Seconds)

508

992

691

784

Higher scores are better