Cannon Lake (microprocessor)

Prior to Cannon Lake's launch, Intel launched another 14 nm process refinement with the codename Coffee Lake.

Having released only one single product during its lifecycle, Cannon Lake is one of the shortest-lived x86 microarchitectures of all time. The sole production model, Core i3-8121U, is a low power entry-level processor designed for laptops, and sold in very limited quantities. It is succeeded by Ice Lake, the Sunny Cove-based microarchitecture manufactured with the same 10 nm process. represents the architecture phase in the process-architecture-optimization model.

Design history and features

Cannon Lake was initially expected to be released in 2015/2016, but the release was pushed back to 2018. Intel demonstrated a laptop with an unknown Cannon Lake CPU at CES 2017 and announced that Cannon Lake based products would be available in 2018 at the earliest.

At CES 2018 Intel announced that it had started shipping mobile Cannon Lake CPUs at the end of 2017 and would ramp up production in 2018.

On April 26, 2018 in its report on first-quarter 2018 financial results, Intel stated it was currently shipping low-volume 10 nm product and expects 10 nm volume production to shift to 2019. In July 2018, Intel announced that volume production of Cannon Lake would be delayed yet again, to late Q2 2019.

The microarchitecture's only product, the Core i3-8121U, is a dual core CPU with Hyper-Threading and Turbo Boost. Despite having an integrated GPU physically present on die, it was disabled during the factory binning process, and therefore non-functional. The model was released in May 2018 in very limited quantities. Apart from laptops, the CPU was also used in Intel's 2018 NUC codenamed Crimson Canyon.

On October 28, 2019, Intel announced that it will be discontinuing the i3-8121U and the Crimson Canyon NUC, with orders being taken till December 27, and shipping till February 28, 2020. This made Cannon Lake one of the shortest-lived x86 CPU microarchitecture, having launched only one CPU model and manufactured for merely 1.5 years.

In July 2021, Intel announced it would be removing support for Cannon Lake graphics in their Linux kernel driver, effective as of Linux 5.15, since no production Cannon Lake CPUs were ever shipped with integrated graphics enabled. Approximately 1,600 lines of source code were removed from the driver as a result.

Improvements

• Skylake-based CPU cores with AVX-512 instruction set support
• First Intel product manufactured with the company's 10 nm process technology