There it is, Intel’s 10 nm Cannon Lake chip: The Core i3-8121U is in Lenovo’s Ideapad 330-15ICN. Apparently, the integrated graphics unit of the processor is missing, because the notebook still contains a dedicated Radeon-GPU from AMD.
Lenovo IdeaPad 330-15ICN version with Intel Cannon Lake-U
Lenovo has released the first notebook with Intel’s Cannon Lake 10nm chip. Both manufacturers do not actively communicate this, but instead, the model is cryptically titled Ideapad 330-15ICN and part of the announcement of the new Ideapad 330 for the US market of May 10, 2018. Accordingly, previous devices are called Ideapad 720S-ARR (AMD Raven Ridge) or Ideapad 720S-13IKB (Intel Kaby Lake). The new Ideapad 330-15ICN contains the Core i3-8121U, a dual core.
It has two cores with hyperthreading and a basic clock rate of 2.2 GHz. But for the first time this Core i3 uses a turbo of up to 3.2 GHz – like all Core i3 of the 8th Gen. Curiously, the Core i3 apparently does not have an integrated graphics unit, but Intel actually produces such a 2+0 design (two cores without iGPU) because the 10 nm process is still not mature. Instead of an integrated graphics, a Radeon RX 540 with 2 GByte from AMD is used, similar to Intel’s NUC8 Crimson Canyon.
The Ideapad 330-15ICN itself is a typical affordable 15.6-inch notebook (see datasheet). It measures 378 x 260 x 23 mm at 2.1 kg and costs a low USD 450 in the entry-level version. For this, buyers only get a TN panel with lean 1,366 x 768 pixels and a ridiculous 200 cd/m² brightness, 4 GB DDR4 RAM in a SO-DIMM slot and a 500 GByte hard disk with 5,400 revolutions per minute. Lenovo also sells the device with the 1080p display, up to 16 GB RAM and up to 256 GB SSD storage.
The notebook is also available as 330-15IKB (Intel Kaby Lake Refresh), 330-15ICH (Intel Coffee Lake H) and 330-15IGM (Intel Gemini Lake) with fast and slow quad core as well as Geforce MX150 or Geforce GTX 1050 or Radeon 530, all variants should still be available in May 2018, but so far the Ideapad 330 is missing in Lenovo’s online shop.