Anandtech articles looking at the Ice Lake uarch and performance:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/14514/examining-intels-ice-la...

https://www.anandtech.com/show/14664/testing-intel-ice-lake-...

I'm personally still excited about these chips for laptops. Lower power and higher IPC mean same-ish performance as the previous generations, but with better battery life and thermals. Plus you get better turbo boost, better graphics, built-in support for TB3, WiFi 6, etc. Seems perfect for something like the Surface Pro. The Core uarch is getting dated, yeah, but Intel is going for breadth and better integration here and it looks compelling.