the beginning of the magazine, where the articles are small10 MAXIMUMPC OCT 2019 maximumpc.com
quickstart
Intel’s new microarchitecture finally lands
Welcome to
Sunny Cove
generations are more of a
marketing term than anything
else—when it thinks there’s
enough to warrant it, it blesses
new chips with a bump. In
this case, it is warranted. Ice
Lake is also Intel’s first 10nm
processor, unless you count
the limited number of oddball
10nm Cannon Lake chips that
were quietly slipped into a few
Chinese laptops. The move to
10nm was originally planned
for 2016, then always appeared
to be about a year away.
What’s so good about
Sunny Cove? Well, it promises
an approximate 18 percent
jump in IPC, instructions per
cycle. This bodes well for the
future. AMD’s Zen 2 managed
around 13 percent over Zen+.
As we reach practical limits
in clock speeds, improving
performance increasingly
means getting more out of
each cycle instead. Sunny
Cove al so has useful increases
in cache size. The Level 1
cache is 50 percent bigger
than Skylake, now 48KB, and
the Level 2 cache has been
doubled, now standing at
512KB per core. Other tweaks
include a greatly improved AI
performance, dubbed Deep
Learning Boost, although
why this is going to be useful
on a laptop is unclear. Early
tests show that performance
is going to be good, although
that IPC increase is blunteda little by clock speeds—the
best of the older Whiskey Lake
processors still clock faster, so
the overall gains are minimal.
However, performance per
watt, a key metric in the mobile
world, is looking good.
As well as Sunny Cove,
the new Ice Lake chips have
another selling point: a new
graphics core—Gen11. Intel
has been using Gen9 for
years, under the brand UHD
(the Gen10 graphics only
appeared on those mysterious
Cannon Lake chips). Previous
on-board graphics from Intel
have been adequate, but
uninspiring. Gen11 moves the
bar considerably. The top-tier
chips carry the Iris Plus brand,
appearing as G7 or G4 in the
chip name, indicating either 64
or 48 execution units (Intel has
a tendency to use a lot of brand
names and code names, which
can get confusing and/orannoying). Gen11 has support
for variable rate shading and
considerably faster memory.
This means decent gaming
at 1080p, as long as you take
some care with the settings
on more demanding titles. It
is this more than anything that
will shift these chips.
It’s not the most exciting
launch of a microarchitecture.
In 2015, Skylake launched
with much more of a bang; the
Core i7-6700K jumped straight
into high-end desktops. So,
when will desktops get Sunny
Cove? There are plenty of
rumors, many of which are
pessimistic—how does 2022
sound? We can certainly
expect more tinkering with
14nm chips before then. Intel
has the designs, what’s holding
it back now is the fabrication.
Meanwhile, we will get a slew
of new Ice Lake laptops ready
for the holiday season. –CLINTEL HAS MOVED to 10th-
generation chips with the
imminent release of 11 Ice
Lake CPUs. There are six low-
power U-Series, and five even
lower power Y-Series, ranging
from a Core i7-1068G7 down to
a Core i3-1000G1, all aimed at
mobile devices. The U-Series
have a 28W range-topper, but
otherwise burn at a TDP of
15W, while the Y-Series make
do with 9W. They carry either
two or four cores, and base
clocks run from just 0.7GHz
to 2.3GHz, with boosts topping
out at 4.1GHz. We get a new
naming convention, too: The
processor numbers all start
with a “10” to indicate the
generation, and end in a two-
digit identifier to indicate the
on-board graphics used. All
are systems on a chip (SoC),
so come with the motherboard
silicon next to the CPU.
According to Intel, these chips
will be “redefining the next era
of laptop experiences.”
The big deal is that we finally
have a new microarchitecture,
the beating x86 core of a CPU.
Ice Lake chips use Sunny
Cove microarchitecture,
which is destined to replace
Skylake over the next few
years in virtually everything.
Intel has been churning out
variations on the Skylake
microarchitecture for years
in sixth, seventh, eighth, and
ninth-gen chips. Intel chipAt last, Intel produces a
mainstream 10nm CPU, with
a new microarchitecture.©^INTEL