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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday January 08 2019, @10:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the seeing-the-future dept.

CES 2019 Quick Bytes: Consumer 10nm is Coming with Intel's Ice Lake

We've been on Intel's case for years to tell us when its 10nm parts are coming to the mass market. Technically Intel already shipped its first 10nm processor, Cannon Lake, but this was low volume and limited to specific geographic markets. This time Intel is promising that its first volume consumer processor on 10nm will be Ice Lake. It should be noted that Intel hasn't put a date on Ice Lake launching, but has promised 10nm on shelves by the end of 2019. It has several products that could qualify for that, but Ice Lake is the likely suspect.

At Intel's Architecture Day in December, we saw chips designated as 'Ice Lake-U', built for 15W TDPs with four cores using the new Sunny Cove microarchitecture and Gen11 graphics. Intel went into some details about this part, which we can share with you today.

The 15W processor is a quad core part supporting two threads per core, and will have 64 EUs of Gen11 graphics. 64 EUs will be the standard 'GT2' mainstream configuration for this generation, up from 24 EUs today. In order to drive that many execution units, Intel stated that they need 50-60 GB/s of memory bandwidth, which will come from LPDDR4X memory. In order for those numbers to line up, they will need LPDDR4X-3200 at a minimum, which gives 51.2 GB/s. [...] For connectivity, the chips will support Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) if the laptop manufacturer uses the correct interface module, but the support for Wi-Fi 6 is in the chip. The processor also supports native Thunderbolt 3 over USB Type-C, marking the first Intel chip with native TB3 support.

CES 2019 Quick Bytes: Intel's 10nm Hybrid x86 Foveros Chip is Called Lakefield

The reason this chip exists is because one of Intel's customers requested a processor with integrated graphics that can idle at 2 milliwatts. After a few years of engineering, Intel is finally there. There's also another trick at play here.

The chip uses a combination of Intel's high power and low power cores. Inside the new chip, which Intel announced at CES is called Lakefield, is one of its high-powered Core architecture Sunny Cove cores, and four low-powered Tremont Atom cores. This is the first Intel chip, or consumer chip at least, to use both core designs at once. This is fairly common for Arm chips in smartphones, but we have not seen it yet in the PC space. We have a block diagram showing cache layouts and things, and at the first showing, Intel's Jim Keller said that the company were having fun with the technology with designing things that could become future parts.

Intel is also announcing an "AI" focused chip that will compete with Nvidia's similar GPU products:

Intel has just announced a brand new class of AI processor: the Intel Nervana NNP-1. This is one of the first truly powerful AI processors that Intel has promised to produce. All previous AI chips the company made were in the mWatt of power, this one is going to be in the "hundreds of watts" of power. While no specific details were given in the demo, it was inferred that the technology will take advantage of Intel's DL Boost technology to offer a CPU based competitor to GPUs.

See also: Intel's Keynote at CES 2019: 10nm, Ice Lake, Lakefield, Snow Ridge, Cascade Lake
Intel's New 9th Gen Desktop CPUs: i3-9350KF, i5-9400F, i5-9400, i5-9600KF, i7-9700KF, i9-9900KF


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