During today’s announcements, a number of things on the CPU front have been shared by Intel. Among it, a new architecture that finds its way under codename “Sunny Cove”. The past nine iterations of Intel’s processors have all been based (more or less) on Nehalem architecture.
If we interpret today’s information well, Sunny Cove will be the first in a based on new architecture different from Nehalem. Intel’s aim is to increase IPC significantly, as surely they can feel the hot air from AMD breathing in their neck.
Intel still firmly believes in 10nm, and expect that all problems are solved soon, with mass production in 2019. Recent rumors that Intel would skip the entire 10 nm process and would switch directly to 7 nm are, according to Intel, not true.
Sunny Cove CPU architecture to offer improved IPC
Intel positions “Sunny Cove” with (expected) improved IPC ( (Instructions Per Clock ).) gains, new instruction sets including AVX-512 and better scalability (more cores less latency). Sunny Cove will be used in the first 10 nm chips; likely Ice Lake.
Sunny Cove procs are already expected in 2019 and will also be based on Intel’s 10nm fabrication process. Intel also mentioned its two of its successors. “Willow Cove” is an update (tick-tock) and can be seen as ZEN+ compared to ZEN. “Willow Cove” would launch in 2020, and thus is a refined 10 nm fabrication process node.
A third cover series architecture is also named, “Golden Cove,” which is to be released in 2021, details on this one are lacking, however, the main design objectives for Sunny Cove were to improve single threaded performance, add new instructions for speeding up AI and Blockchain and improving the scalability of the cores.
