AFAIK 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 iterati

AFAIK 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...