Lenovo IdeaPad 330 is first to feature 10nm Intel Cannon Lake CPU

Well this is quite a surprise. Tech analysts and journalists had been wondering for some time now where Intel's 10nm chips were. As you may know, the chip giant claimed at started shipping 10nm Cannon Lake chips before the end of 2017. Nobody had seen these parts and with the confirmation that volume production of 10nm has been delayed to well into 2019, lots of folks assumed these parts didn't exist in any reasonable quantity.

That may have been wrong as there's now some evidence of Intel's 10nm Cannon Lake. AnandTech reports Lenovo is shipping a new IdeaPad 330 laptop in China, this model can be configured with an Intel Core i3-8121 dual-core processor. This is a 10nm Cannon Lake chip with a 2.2GHz base frequency.

It's an entry-level system with a price of around $449 pre-tax (converted from yuan). The laptop has a 15.6" TN screen with a 1366 x 768 pixel resolution and AMD Radeon RX 540 2GB graphics. The base configuration has 4GB DDR4-2133 and 500GB 5400RPM HDD for 3299 yuan, but you can also get a version with 8GB RAM, 1TB HDD, and 256GB SSD for 3899 yuan.

The Ideapad 330 is a low end unit in both price and design. The bottom configuration is only 3299CNY, which converts to around $449 pre-tax. This model will feature the new 10nm Core i3-8121, a dual core processor based on Cannon Lake running at a 2.2 GHz base frequency. Pairing with this CPU will be an AMD Radeon RX 540 2GB, as the Intel processor does not have integrated graphics - technically the silicon for them is there, but in this design it is disabled. Our original source, Computerbase.de, states that the processor can turbo up to 3.1 GHz.

Basically, this confirms Intel is indeed shipping 10nm parts. Albeit low-end dual-core chips, with disabled graphics, so not really inspiring a lot of confidence.