Intel Reveals New 10th-Gen Core Processors Suitable for MacBook Air and Base 13-Inch MacBook Pro

It's a shame that Apple killed the 12" MacBook.

AnandTech has an extensive preview article. https://www.anandtech.com/show/14664/testing-intel-ice-lake-10nm

tl;dr: two steps forward, two steps back

Will this work

WITHOUT LOUD FAN?

No. LOUD FAN good.

Will this work

WITHOUT LOUD FAN?

It's a shame that Apple killed the 12" MacBook.

This CPU line-up is probably as good a clue as any as to why the 12-inch MacBook was killed (for now). The 2015 MacBook launched with a 4.5W Y-series CPU. Last year's Y-series CPUs then went to 5-7W. Now we're at 9W. Apple designed a laptop based on the assumption — presumably promised as such by Intel — that Intel would keep iterating on a roughly 4.5W TDP CPU, and they failed to do so, even after this process shrink.

700MHz base clock. What [S]decade[/S] century is it again?

This is good, actually. Low clock rates means Intel has some breathing room for future generations at the same process size to offer more performance simply by cranking up the clock rate.

Which TDPs are MacBook pro compatible? All of them?

9W: probably the MacBook Air (which is currently at 7W, but presumably Apple has learnt the lesson not to trust Intel on that).

15W: low-end 13-inch MacBook Pro.

28W: possibly the higher-end 13-inch MacBook Pro, but Apple probably wants more options for that. Also, this CPU model won't ship for a while.

Critically, none of these are even remotely an option for the 15-inch (16-inch?) MacBook Pro, which likely won't see another CPU upgrade until Comet Lake-H in Q2 2020. It'll offer up to ten cores, but it will still be at 14nm and still use a revised Skylake architecture. Still no LPDDR4, even.

Can't come soon enough the day that Apple can engineer some A-series chip and release upgrades when the Mac, not Intel, are ready. I could see the MacBook line getting resuscitated as a canary for this

Macs are fast enough. Please improve battery life!

Want to have a fanless MacBook with 16GB RAM/1TB SSD. Or better a MacPad. MacBook Air/Pro fans are so loud.

Sign me up for a Quad Core MacBook Air!

...Or 13” Quad Core MBP without Touch Bar, whichever comes first.

It's a shame that Apple killed the 12" MacBook.

It will come back when Apple switches to using their own ARM-based processors. They are perfectly suited to run in an fanless system like the Macbook and far are more powerful than anything Intel has at that TDP ('https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_design_power').