Laptop with Intel’s 10nm Cannon Lake spotted online — definitely underwhelming given the long wait

Intel has been delaying their 10nm manufacturing node again and again, resorting to 14nm++ for Coffee Lake. It seems that they have finally pushed 10nm CPUs out into the market, but it does seem quite underwhelming. So underwhelming, that Intel has refrained from calling this the 9th Generation, but instead marketing this as the 8th Generation Core i3 ULV processors.

The laptop in question is the Lenovo IdeaPad 330, a decidedly entry-level model with an i3-8121U. The i3 family was notably missing from last year’s Kaby Lake Refresh series, so now we have one, based on the latest process node. Even then, Cannon Lake seems like a much smaller upgrade over the Kaby Lake generation, with just two physical cores and HyperThreading, for a total of four processing threads. In fact the base clocks are slower on the i3-8121U than its predecessor, the i3-7100U, at just 2.2 GHz versus 2.4 GHz in the older chip. The newer i3-8121U does have 1MB more L3 cache though, for 4MB of cache.

The Lenovo IdeaPad 330 also features a Radeon 540 with 2GB of dedicated GDDR5 VRAM, which is necessary given that the i3-8121U lacks an iGPU. The rest of the specifications are equally uninteresting, with configurations up to 8GB RAM and a 256GB SSD + 1TB HDD storage option. There is also the horribly outdated 1366 x 768 display and the unspectacular 22.7mm thickness and 2.1kg weight.

The only saving grace of the Lenovo IdeaPad 330 is probably its price, starting from 3299 yuan (~RM2052) for the lowest end, 4GB RAM + 500GB storage option, all the way up to 4299 yuan (~RM2674) for the 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD + 1TB HDD storage variant. You can go ahead and check it out on JD.com.

Lenovo IdeaPad 330 Specifications

Pokdepinion: I will go with Kaby Lake Refresh or Ryzen Mobile, thank you very much.