Intel's Amber Lake-Y processors will soon join the chipmaker's 8th generation Intel Core family of processors. The Amber Lake-Y chips are the direct successors to the Kaby Lake-Y counterparts and, as such the upcoming processors would probably be employed by manufacturers in 2-in-1 convertibles, Ultrabooks, tablets, mini PCs, and compute sticks. We got our first look at two of these new processors via a leak from Dell's Chilean arm last week in an upcoming refresh of the XPS 13 2-in-1.
The new Amber Lake-Y processors are produced under Intel's refined 14nm++ manufacturing process. According to the Romanian publication NextLab501, the ultra-low voltage (ULV) Amber Lake-Y parts will be released in three SKUs: Core M3-8100Y, Core i5-8200Y, and Core i7-8500Y. The trio features an identical dual-core design with four threads and 4MB of onboard L3 cache.
The Core M3-8100Y sits at the bottom of the Amber Lake-Y hierarchy with a modest base clock of 1.1 GHz. The entry-level model has a turbo clock of 3.4 GHz when one core is active and 2.7 GHz when two cores are active. The Core i5-8200Y, on the other hand, operates at a 1.3 GHz base clock with a turbo clock that escalates to 3.9 GHz with one active core and 3.2 GHz with two active cores. Lastly, the Core i7-8500Y is the flagship of the lot. It runs at a 1.5 GHz base clock with a single core turbo clock of 4.2 GHz and a dual-core turbo clock at 3.6 GHz.
All three Amber Lake-Y processors employ Intel's UHD Graphics 615 (GT2) integrated graphics processing unit (iGPU). The iGPU features 24 Execution Units (EUs) running at a base clock of 300 MHz with a turbo clock up to 1000 MHz depending on the model. The integrated graphics lacks its own dedicated graphics memory, and therefore takes a chunk of the system's main memory when performing graphics tasks. From an architectural perspective, this looks to be practically the same iGPU found in the previous Kaby Lake-Y processors, but with slightly different clock speeds and power improvements.
The Amber Lake-Y processors are slated to be released during the third quarter of this year. As noted up top, Dell has already prepared its XPS 13 2-in-1 convertibles powered by the new Amber Lake-Y processors. We expect to see more of these chips in competing convertibles and utlra-portable laptops in the coming months.
