In an unusual move for Intel, the chip giant has ever so slightly taken the wraps off of one of their future generation Core architectures. Basic information on the Ice Lake architecture has been published over on Intel's codename decoder, officially confirming for the first time the existence of the architecture and that it will be made on Intel's 10nm+ process.

Ice Lake will be Intel's next-gen 10nm CPUs, compared to the current-gen Kaby Lake processors on the second-gen 14nm (14nm+) process. The new Coffee Lake architecture will be Intel's 8th generation Core processors, and will see the company plonk down the new Core processors onto their first-gen 10nm process. The surprise knee jerk reaction to AMD's continued threat on the CPU market with Ryzen, Ryzen Threadripper and EPYC has Intel scurrying around to catch up. This is yet another move to confuse consumers, as Intel announced Ice Lake as a "successor to the 8th generation Intel Core processor family". As The Verge points out, this would imply that Ice Lake is a semi-9th generation CPU architecture that will succeed, in some ways, the 8th generation CPUs. Intel will be tapping its 10nm+ process, the second generation of the tech at that small scale. As The Verge points out again, this is confusing as it seems there should be another first-gen 10nm release in between. Ice Lake won't appear until sometime in 2019, but it will surely be an interesting ride between now and then to see how much AMD can make Intel squirm in that time.