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posted by martyb on Wednesday August 16 2017, @04:43AM   Printer-friendly
from the double-plus-good dept.

Intel will announce its Coffee Lake processors on August 21. They will be the last generation of 14nm(++) Core processors before 10nm Cannon Lake and Ice Lake, which is described as using a "10nm+" process:

In an unusual move for Intel, the chip giant has ever so slightly taken the wraps off of one of their future generation Core architectures. Basic information on the Ice Lake architecture has been published over on Intel's codename decoder, officially confirming for the first time the existence of the architecture and that it will be made on Intel's 10nm+ process.

The Ice Lake processor family is a successor to the 8th generation Intel® Core™ processor family. These processors utilize Intel's industry-leading 10 nm+ process technology.

This is an unexpected development as the company has yet to formally detail (let alone launch) the first 10nm Core architecture – Cannon Lake – and it's rare these days for Intel to talk more than a generation ahead in CPU architectures. Equally as interesting is the fact that Intel is calling Ice Lake the successor to their upcoming 8th generation Coffee Lake processors, which codename bingo aside, throws some confusion on where the 14nm Coffee Lake and 10nm Cannon Lake will eventually stand.

[...] Working purely on lithographic nomenclature, Intel has three processes on 14nm: 14, 14+, and 14++. As shown to everyone at Intel's Technology Manufacturing Day a couple of months ago, these will be followed by a trio of 10nm processes: 10nm, 10nm+ (10+), and 10++.

Tick Tock has given way to plus signs everywhere.

Coffee Lake will include the first mainstream 6-core chips from Intel, including the Intel Core i5-8600K and i7-8700K.

Also at Tom's Hardware.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2017, @05:54AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2017, @05:54AM (#554578)

    Sure, x86 is an architecture, but there are low-level details that are implemented in very many ways, not to mention extensions for specialized functions.

    Programmers (that is, compilers) tend to target x86, but it would be possible to target Ice Lake by writing code that is particular to the Ice Lake processor; that is what makes it a [micro]architecture.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2017, @10:34AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2017, @10:34AM (#554646)

    You can't go around referring to microarchitectures as architectures. Reason being, "What's special about the Sky Lake architecture?" and "What's special about the Sky Lake microarchitecture?" are different questions: The former refers to new instructions while the latter will link you to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylake_(microarchitecture)#Architecture [wikipedia.org] .

    For people not familiar with the nomenclature, review the table headers over at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_CPU_microarchitectures [wikipedia.org] and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_CPU_microarchitectures [wikipedia.org] . There's no reason to excuse sloppy news reporting and press releases.