Intel’s transition to building processors on a 10nm manufacturing process has been delayed repeatedly. Once upon a time, the company said that it’d go into mass production at the end of 2015; with its most recent financial results, the company pushed that back, again, to 2019. But Intel has also said that, although the yields aren’t good enough for large-scale production, it has been shipping 10nm processors, codenamed Cannon Lake, to an unspecified customer.
That customer is Lenovo: the IdeaPad 330 has been listed by Chinese retailers, and it includes a mysterious processor, the Core i3-8121U. The name tells us the market positioning (it’s an i3, so it’s low-end), the power envelope (the “U” at the end means that it’s a 15W chip), and the branding (the number starts with an 8, so it’s going to be another “8th-generation” chip, just like the Kaby Lake-R, Kaby Lake-G, and Coffee Lake processors). This means that “8th generation” is a rather vague label that describes several different processor variants, built on several different manufacturing processes (two 14nm variants and now 10nm). Read more
Product Specifications
Essentials
Product Collection : 8th Generation Intel® Core™ i3 Processors
Code Name : Products formerly Cannon Lake
Vertical Segment : Mobile
Processor Number : i3-8121U
Status : Launched
Launch Date : Q2’18
Lithography : 10 nm
More Details
