[The Exiled]

Having swallowed its pride and started again with 10nm chips, Intel teases features in these 2019-ish processors

"We have humble pie to eat right now, and we're eating it," Murthy Renduchintala, Intel's chief engineering officer, said yesterday.

In 2013, Intel claimed it could produce chips with a 10nm lithography process by 2015, then revised that timetable to 2016, and then late 2017. Then late 2019 at the earliest, or perhaps early 2020 for most system buyers. In mid-2018, Intel limped out a wimpy dual-CPU 10nm Core i3 processor, aimed at low-power Chinese laptops, and codenamed Cannon Lake, mainly so it could say it was shipping some silicon at that node. However, the Cannon Lake family is now effectively dead, and the process engineers have gone back to the drawing board to make their fabrication technology work properly for the mass production of future half-decent 10nm chipsets.

In the second half of 2019 or early 2020, at the request of an unnamed customer (Microsoft - Surface?), Intel expects to launch a multi-core processor that has large and small x86 CPUs, like modern smartphones have four, six or eight beefy Arm-compatible CPUs and the same number of smaller power-efficient cores. Arm calls this big.LITTLE. Intel hopes to produce a 10nm fanless system-on-chip with a set of high-performance cores to take on intensive workloads, and a set of low-power Atom cores to run all other code. This chip will be built out of a 3D packing technology that stacks dies on top of each other to form a system-on-chip. The base 22nm die houses all the I/O, SRAM, and power control circuits, while dies of 10nm compute cores sit on top, along with memory, storage, and any GPUs and other accelerators. This stacking tech, dubbed Foveros, allows Intel to mix and match components and sit them on top of each other to form a system-on-chip.

Intel teased another upcoming 10nm processor, this one codenamed Sunny Cove (individual core microarchitecture - not the chip) which, we're told, will have larger buffers and caches to handle data-heavy workloads, new vector instructions to run more operations, such as AES encryption, bit manipulation, and SHA hashing, in parallel, and similar tweaks and enhancements to reduce information-processing latency. Sunny Cove CPUs will form the basis of next-gen Xeon and Core products. being a 10nm component, this will land some time in the future.

Izvor: The Register i Gamers Nexus