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This is a really important result for Intel, as they might continue to keep on being competitive for certain workloads. Intel managing to eek out some more life
by DCKing 6y ago
This is a really important result for Intel, as they might continue to keep on being competitive for certain workloads. Intel managing to eek out some more life out of the one thing they still had (and were about to lose): single thread performance.
One thing that Intel has done incredibly well these past five years is eeking out every damn thing out of Skylake they had (IIUC this is still fundamentally an iteration on Skylake, albeit the biggest we had since 2015). Their inability to improve process and architecture is painful to watch but man have they stretched what they already had under this competitive pressure.
That power consumption though, oof. Anything that is remotely multithreaded suffers immediately, and this will be obliterated again by Zen 3 APUs, and likely Apple's A14X. But there's some chance now they will still be able to win some benchmarks against AMD and Apple into next year, so good for them!
- formerly_proven 6y agoThis isn't a Skylake-derived CPU, this is a Willow Cove CPU, which is based on a new uarch.
- profile53 6y agoAFAIK the lineage can be traced all the back to Sandy Bridge in 2011. Fundamentally, it seems Willow Cove is an iteration of Skylake which in turn is an iteration of Sandy Bridge. Some buses and internal caches were widened but the general structure is fairly similar to Sandy Bridge. Some quick review suggests the big change for Willow Cove was a cache redesign [1]. The previous generation, Sunny Cove, added widened reorder buffers, a larger L1 data cache, added components to some integer units (including an integer division unit), doubled the load/store buffers, and widened the vector units to handle 512 bit instructions without splitting them (like Ryzen currently does). But, the architecture and core structure is still the same as Skylake. Same number of integer, vector, and floating point units, fairly similar front end, etc. For reference: https://www.hardwaretimes.com/intel-sunny-cove-vs-zen-2-core-architectures-comparing-comet-lake-ice-lake-and-ryzen-3000/ https://www.hardwaretimes.com/intel-sunny-cove-vs-zen-2-core... https://www.anandtech.com/show/15971/intels-11th-gen-core-tiger-lake-soc-detailed-superfin-willow-cove-and-xelp/3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/15971/intels-11th-gen-core-ti...
- DCKing 6y agoMy impression was that Sunny/Willow Cove was still an iteration on Skylake, just a larger one than all the other Lakes Intel had to come up with in the past years. Perhaps I'm just confused since all the architecture writeups compare it to Skylake, just with boosted internal specifications.