The first Intel processor that will be built on a 10nm manufacturing process has been confirmed as the Core i3-8121U - a 2-core/4-thread Cannon Lake mobile processor.

According to Intel's listing, the i3-8121U chip has a 2.2-GHz base clock and a 3.2-GHz Turbo Boost peak. It supports up to 32 GB of non-ECC DDR4-2400, LPDDR4-2400, or even-lower-power LPDDR4X-2400 memory across two channels. The chip has 4 MB of L3 cache enabled and occupies a 15-W thermal envelope.

Interestingly, there doesn't appear to be evidence that the CPU includes an integrated graphics processor - something that's listed in detail on the product page of the Coffee Lake-based Core i3-8109U.

It may be that Intel does not wish to reveal details of the onboard graphics of Cannon Lake CPUs at this time, or it's decided to cut the feature out of certain product ranges.

The Lenovo IdeaPad330-15 seems to be among the first laptops based on the new Core i3-8121U CPU. Listed online in Asian websites, the laptop uses an AMD Radeon RX 540 GPU.

Intel has abandoned its tick-tock cycle in favor of additional cycles of optimization on each manufacturing process, most likely due to issues shrinking things further to 10nm and subsequent Cannon Lake delays.

The result is that since its current 14nm lithography was introduced back in 2015 with the Broadwell architecture, we've seen three more generations of 14nm CPUs - Skylake, Kaby Lake and most recently Coffee Lake, with the promise of yet another range of CPUs this year that will likely include an 8-core dektop processor, as Intel tries to reign in AMD's Ryzen 7 range of CPUs.