Intel announces next-generation CPU architecture 'Sunny Cove', built-in GPU 'Gen 11', discrete GPU 'Xe'

Intel announced an overview of the new CPU architecture " Sunny Cove " at Architecture Day 2018. In addition, the new iGPU " Gen 11 " and the discrete GPU (dGPU) " Xe " brand etc. are also clarified.

Intel's Architecture Day 2018: The Future of Core, Intel GPUs, 10 nm, and Hybrid x86
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13699/intel-architecture-day-2018-core-future-hybrid-x86

◆ Sunny Cove
Intel announced the next generation CPU architecture "Sunny Cove." Sunny Cove is an architecture adopted by Intel Core series, Xeon for servers, etc. It is expected that a CPU manufactured in 10 nm process will be introduced into market within 2019. From Sunny Cove onwards, improvements will be continued to "Willow Cove" and "Golden Cove".

The "Skylake" architecture, which became the basis of the 6th generation to the 9th generation Intel Core series, will be renewed on Sunny Cove. The successor to the Lake series becomes the Cove series with "Willow Cove" which redesigned Sunny Cove's cache, optimized transistor, added security function, improved single-thread performance, added AI function etc. It seems.

According to Intel, in the architectural improvement, performance improvement is classified into two sections "general thing" and "special thing".

The increase in IPC, which is the number of instructions executed per clock, is a general performance increase, and Sunny Cove increases L1 cache by 50% to 48 KB compared to Skylake. Also, it is clearly stated that the L2 cache will also increase.

The number of execution ports also increases from 8 to 10.

Performance improvements are also made by additional instruction sets tailored to specific purposes such as machine learning performance. Sunny Cove will support not only AVX - 512 units but also IFMA instructions used for encryption. It also supports Vector-AES, SHA, SHA-NI and others.

◆ Gen 11
"Gen9" graphics was loaded on the Skylake processor in 2015, but we announced the iGPU "Gen 11" which will be integrated with Sunny Cove anew. "Gen 10" which was developed as planned to be built in Cannon Lake seems to be buried without seeing the sun, apparently being released only in the state of being invalidated by Core i 3 8121 U.

Although details on Gen 11 are not revealed, from the slide image, 64 execution units (EU) are divided into 4 slices, and it can be confirmed that they are divided into sub slices containing 8 EUs.

According to Intel, Gen 11 has doubled the FP16 performance compared to Coffee Lake's "Gen 9.5", the memory interface is also redesigned, the GPU's L3 cache is quadrupled to 3 MB with Gen 9.5 ratio It is. Therefore, 'Gen 11 exceeds 1 TFLOPS' performance is said.

It also supports pixel shading similar to NVIDIA's Variable Pixel Shading. Intel said the frame rate will increase by 30% in games that support multi-rate shading. In addition, the HEVC encoder is designed to be scalable, and it is expected to support 8K video in the future.

In addition, the display engine supports Adaptive Sync that works with HDR because of high precision data path.

Although Intel did not touch anything, AnandTech points out the possibility that "type-C video output" is supported from images.

◆ Demo
A demonstration of Sunny Cove's CPU and a chip based on Gen 11 graphics was done.

In the CPU cooler, "ICL-U" character. This is considered to be "Ice Lake-U". Sunny Cove architecture CPU + Gen 11 It is expected that TDP 15W notebook PC processor that adopts iGPU will appear.

Intel did not present any information on the number of cores, the number of clocks, etc., and demonstration of 7-Zip was done. In the 7-Zip benchmark Sunny Cove, which supports new instruction sets such as Vector-AES and SHA-NI, was 75% faster than Skylake-based CPU. This means that the benefits of "special performance up" are shown rather than the "general performance up" mentioned above.

In addition, the demonstration with Tekken 7 showed a smooth and smooth movement compared to the Skylake + Gen 9 system. However, there seems to be a scene where the frame rate falls below 30 FPS.

◆ Xe
It is clear that Intel is already embarking on the development of discrete GPU (dGPU).

Intel announces to release discrete GPU in 2020 - GIGAZINE

Inel's dGPU released in 2020 will be adopted the brand "Xe". Xe is scheduled to be manufactured in 10 nm process.

Xe, which has been informally called "Gen 12" so far, will cover a wide range from PC to data center. Intel also plans to develop APIs that are common to all CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and AIs, and Xe can be the cornerstone of several generations of graphics.

◆ Foveros
Intel announced a new 3D packaging technology " Foveros ". AMD already announced to separate I / O and CPU (Chiplet) with Epyc's architecture " Rome ", but Intel also manufactures SoC with the same direction.

I / O and memory can be placed on a large silicon die, and a Compute tiplet can be placed on it.