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Intel Unveils Roadmaps For Core Architecture and Atom Architecture (anandtech.com)

Intel on Wednesday surprised a number of people when it shared not one roadmap on CPUs, but two. AnandTech: For the high performance Core architecture, Intel lists three new codenames over the next three years. To be very clear here, these are the codenames for the individual core microarchitecture, not the chip, which is an important departure from how Intel has previously done things. Sunny Cove, built on 10nm, will come to market in 2019 and offer increased single-threaded performance, new instructions, and 'improved scalability'.

Willow Cove looks like it will be a 2020 core design, most likely also on 10nm. Intel lists the highlights here as a cache redesign (which might mean L1/L2 adjustments), new transistor optimizations (manufacturing based), and additional security features, likely referring to further enhancements from new classes of side-channel attacks. Golden Cove rounds out the trio, and is firmly in that 2021 segment in the graph. Process node here is a question mark, but we're likely to see it on 10nm and or 7nm. Golden Cove is where Intel adds another slice of the serious pie onto its plate, with an increase in single threaded performance, a focus on AI performance, and potential networking and AI additions to the core design. Security features also look like they get a boost.

The lower-powered Atom microarchitecture roadmap is on a slower cadence than the Core microarchitecture, which is not surprising given its history. The upcoming microarchitecture for 2019 is called Tremont, which focuses on single threaded performance increases, battery life increases, and network server performance. Based on some of the designs later in this article, we think that this will be a 10nm design. Following Tremont will be Gracemont, which Intel lists as a 2021 product. Beyond this will be a future 'mont' core (and not month as listed in the image).

60 comments

  1. More pci-e lanes? by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 1

    More pci-e lanes?

    1. Re:More pci-e lanes? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ECC memory?

    2. Re:More pci-e lanes? by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 1

      you pay more for that or go AMD

  2. RISC is Dead. by mholve · · Score: 0

    Long live RISC!

  3. The hell? by XanC · · Score: 4, Funny

    A Slashdot article that links to the very previous Slashdot article??

    1. Re: The hell? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      msmash loves herself. Decline and fall of nerdism. Next up either an Apple article or something Britishy.

    2. Re: The hell? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Oh yes. Those articles arenâ(TM)t funny.

    3. Re:The hell? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Two articles for two roadmaps.

    4. Re:The hell? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      intel's marketing department is on the hot seat..

      perhaps they're of the belief that the more bullshit you shovel, the more you can cover up a decade of security woes and your more-recent production issues that allowed your only competitor to get a jump on you.

  4. More Duplicate Submissions by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Increases in parallel processing should allow simultaneous bi-directional Beowulf cluster submissions unless your a Luddite.
    Apps

    1. Re:More Duplicate Submissions by jfdavis668 · · Score: 1

      Imagine that!

  5. Bu bu but AMD! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    There. Now the nerds don't have to fret.

  6. 10nm by 110010001000 · · Score: 1

    That would be pretty impressive if Intel can get commercial chips at 10nm by 2019.

    1. Re:10nm by StuartHankins · · Score: 1
      Apple / TSMC is already at 7nm in their Bionic 12, does that not count?

      The Apple A12X Bionic is a 64-bit ARM-based system on a chip (SoC) designed by Apple Inc. It first appeared in the 11.0" iPad Pro and the third generation of the 12.9" iPad Pro, which were both announced on October 30, 2018.[88] It has four high-performance cores and four high-efficiency cores. The A12X is manufactured by TSMC using a 7 nm FinFET process, the first to ship in a tablet.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A12X

    2. Re:10nm by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      Apple / TSMC is already at 7nm in their Bionic 12, does that not count?

      No, it doesn't. I mean, it does, but it only counts as 10nm. To be fair, their yields are better than Intel's, but their feature sizes are comparable so calling one 7nm and one 10nm is really 100% BS.

      P.S. This comes up in literally every conversation on this topic because other people are making the same mistake you are. Most of them are Apple fans, too.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    3. Re:10nm by StuartHankins · · Score: 1

      If it's really 10 then they should label it as 10 not 7. That would be misleading to most people. Thanks for the insight.

      I am an Apple and Linux fan and use both RHEL and OSX daily. Apple products work better for me than other OSs, and when I get home I don't have the patience to deal with Windows. YMMV and all that. We need OS options, a monoculture OS is as dangerous for everyone as a monoculture with seeds and for mostly the same reasons.

  7. Is Meltdown addressed? by SurenEnfiajyan · · Score: 2

    ...security features, likely referring to further enhancements from new classes of side-channel attacks.

    I wonder if Meltdown is fixed.

    1. Re:Is Meltdown addressed? by Allasard · · Score: 3, Informative

      ...security features, likely referring to further enhancements from new classes of side-channel attacks.

      I wonder if Meltdown is fixed.

      Should be according to the PCWorld article:

      "Sunny Cove will also be the first CPU cores to include hardware mitigation for Variant 3 and L1TF side-channel attacks that goose data by exploiting how CPUs prefetch data to improve performance."

    2. Re:Is Meltdown addressed? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      mitigation != fix

    3. Re:Is Meltdown addressed? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      In that case, no, it's not fixed. The only way to fix it is to use an in-order CPU with no prefetch. If you want to use a CPU with recent performance, you're only hope is to mitigate it.

    4. Re:Is Meltdown addressed? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It is for the Ryzen 2700 that I am currently using. Bye Intel.

      $ lscpu
      Architecture: x86_64
      CPU op-mode(s): 32-bit, 64-bit
      Byte Order: Little Endian
      CPU(s): 16
      On-line CPU(s) list: 0-15
      Thread(s) per core: 2
      Core(s) per socket: 8
      Socket(s): 1
      NUMA node(s): 1
      Vendor ID: AuthenticAMD
      CPU family: 23
      Model: 8
      Model name: AMD Ryzen 7 2700 Eight-Core Processor
      Stepping: 2
      CPU MHz: 1375.258
      CPU max MHz: 3200.0000
      CPU min MHz: 1550.0000

    5. Re:Is Meltdown addressed? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I have a hard time parsing th last 3 lines, the CPU seems to be running below its minimum frequency!

    6. Re:Is Meltdown addressed? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Totally normal, all modern CPUs downclock when utilization is low to save on heat and power.

  8. Most software is signle thread. by jellomizer · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The biggest problem I see that most software is build around single threads. Back in the day I took Parallel processing course as an elective for my undergrad. It was a small class, (As its time conflicted with the graphics class, which was much more popular) however it really opened my mind on the actual power of Parallel processing. However most application that are running just use one thread, and you can see only one CPU doing all the work, so while the process may take a long time, it doesn't get split up.
    I am happy to see more focus on single core speed because unfortunately that is still needed.

    --
    If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    1. Re:Most software is signle thread. by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2

      For performance single threaded speed isn't that important for many applications. More threads and PCIe lanes is likely to help more, especially with NVMe and 5/10 gigabit network interfaces.

      Software development: Multi-threaded compilation is pretty common.
      CAD: All the major software is multi-threaded or not CPU bound now.
      Video encoding: Multi-threaded and offloaded to the GPU.
      Gaming: Well optimized games are heavily multi-threaded.
      Servers: Textbook multi-threaded application.
      Browsers: Since Firefox Quantum they are all heavily multi-threaded.

      Are there any really big use-cases that depend on single threaded performance, that aren't just ancient software running at 9000x the speed it was originally designed for?

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    2. Re:Most software is signle thread. by alvinrod · · Score: 2

      I think it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem. It's not that those applications can't be written to take advantage of parallelism, it's that there weren't (and maybe still aren't) a lot of developers who took classes on it (because hey, graphics!) so we end up still relying on improvements in single-threaded performance to drive gains. For a long while, it didn't even make sense to hire developers writing commercial software who had any skills with writing multi-threaded software, because consumer PCs all had a single core and no SMT.

      Things have certainly changed over the last decade for a variety of reasons, but I do realize that there's still a lot of old code out there that isn't going to be fixed up. I would say that things are quite a bit better though and that there are a lot of applications that are at least lightly-threaded and aren't completely bound to a single core.

    3. Re:Most software is signle thread. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      A lot can be parallelized but a lot also can't. Not easily at least. Most languages also make multi-threaded programming difficult. You have to do a lot of it by hand and must plan from the beginning how you will split up the work. We've been waiting a long time for programmers to get with it and write multi-threaded applications but outside of workloads that are easy to do so or industries where its required, it hasn't happened. It's in part the realities of their work loads, in part due to a lack of education on how to do it, and part laziness. I think to get real progress on the consumer level we will have to make it completely transparent to the developers. So they dont have to worry about it. That means putting the work on the compiler. That's a pretty serious undertaking, compiler optimization is difficult and never ending. But in this age of code bootcamps, bad coding practices, developing fucking desktop applications to run in DOM and the regression that is Systemd, we will have to give it to developers on a silver platter.

    4. Re: Most software is signle thread. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You just made half of those things up.

      Games: some use multiple threads well, but most use two or three at most.

      Servers: could be multithreaded, but in practice many loads are not.

      Browsers: JavaScript.

      5/10gb Ethernet? That is a joke of a justification. For starters, the bandwidth Ethernet is decades from cutting edge, so it's not even a reason. But if it were, that doesn't defuse the actual problem that applications are mostly few-threaded.

      Let's refocus back to the real issue: it's not about single thread cs multi thread. Clearly multithread is better, since there are a few things to do at most given times across a system.

      But 30 is not a few. Until the software industry catches up and starts using 30 cores, the cpu vendors are not helping by offering 30 cores instead of 8 faster cores.

    5. Re: Most software is signle thread. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This has been well discussed for a long time. Amdahl's law for example, came from the time when Amdahl mainframes were popular.

    6. Re:Most software is signle thread. by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      Most software doesn't need any more CPU power. Nothing would be gained by making it work on multiple threads.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    7. Re: Most software is signle thread. by AmiMoJo · · Score: 1

      Since all modern games consoles and all modern gaming PCs are multi-core all modern games are optimized for multiple threads.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    8. Re:Most software is signle thread. by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      The biggest problem I see that most software is build around single threads.

      And we haven't run one piece of software in a long time.

      *Posted from a machine that currently is using 30% CPU in another application on it's own single thread for a virus scan.

  9. Atom by jfdavis668 · · Score: 1

    The real underdog in the CPU race.

    1. Re:Atom by sd4f · · Score: 1

      Didn't intel announce that they were giving up on atom?

    2. Re:Atom by jfdavis668 · · Score: 1

      Not according to this article.

  10. Old Gear by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Get with the times. Alien tech is over 70 years old now. And ILLEGAL ALIEN TECH to boot. I rest my case.

  11. Geting excited with vaporware by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    From the summary: "Golden Cove is where Intel adds another slice of the serious pie onto its plate"

    Better be carefull with that pie! The hot vapor will probably burn your mouth!

  12. So, nothing really new until 2021 by Targon · · Score: 3, Interesting

    So, until Golden Cove shows up, it will be tweaks and adjustments to what is currently out there, which hasn't been much of an improvement in over three years now. The people at AMD will probably be celebrating, because that means they have 2019 and 2020 where Intel won't have a significant design improvement to compete with their Zen2 based products that will be out in the next quarter(exact timeframe should be announced at CES).

    Cache improvements....yea, it will help, but won't be a significant redesign of the CPU design.

    1. Re:So, nothing really new until 2021 by 110010001000 · · Score: 0

      There is really nothing you can do to digital processors at this point which is going to have a significant impact on performance.

    2. Re:So, nothing really new until 2021 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That BS. A brand new architecture would be enough to have significant impact... just see the difference between IBM's Power to Intel's for an example of what's possible, and even IBM's Power arch is already relatively old.

      The problem is that Intel won't have the balls to burn the time and money needed to really innovate, and that's why some years from now it will probably have to face real competition coming from even ARM designs.

    3. Re:So, nothing really new until 2021 by 110010001000 · · Score: 0

      Yeah no. Otherwise they would have done it already. Or someone else would have.

    4. Re:So, nothing really new until 2021 by Gr8Apes · · Score: 1

      Not really - recall how long Intel held onto the Netburst architecture when they were getting their asses handed to them daily? The only reason they're still around was because of their deep pockets and virtual market monopoly. It looks like the Netburst cycle is playing out again.

      --
      The cesspool just got a check and balance.
    5. Re:So, nothing really new until 2021 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      AMD is proving you wrong atm.. by going with simple interconnected dies and ramping up the core count big time.

    6. Re:So, nothing really new until 2021 by bluefoxlucid · · Score: 1

      RISC-V is going to revolutionize everything.

    7. Re:So, nothing really new until 2021 by fintux · · Score: 1

      Imagine someone saying that at the time of 8086, would kind of sound silly in retrospect, wouldn't it?

    8. Re:So, nothing really new until 2021 by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      RISC-V is going to revolutionize everything.

      It might, but at best that revolution is probably a decade away.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  13. Roadmap to GET FUCKED Intel! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    Intel owes us money. They lied for decades and betrayed us all for the NSA.

    Fuck the NSA.
    Fuck Intel.

  14. Programmers are limited by C/C++ and themselves. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Most algorithms are mostly parallelizable. And in the real world, you usually have many data sets, like client requests, pixels, game actors, threads, etc, that are all processed in parallel.

    The only reason that parallel programming is not as prevalent as it should be, is that C/C++-like languages and coding styles are really bad at that sort of thing, yet dominate. And people still are "new" to doing serious parallel programming due to that. It's still very much treated stepmotherly.
    Look at thinks like Haskell, where the compiler always knows what evaluation is required for what, and hence there is nothing in the language preventing automatic parallelization of everything possible. But the compiler is still written in C++, making it way harder. You can still use thread sparks, to get it mostly done.

    Coders need to step up, and need to take parallel programming seriously! 1024 threads should be doable blindfolded, with the keyboard behind their backs.

  15. Does Intel sound a bit desperate? by gweihir · · Score: 2

    No matter. They screwed over their customers the last few years, and hence I will not even remotely consider buying from them now.

    --
    Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    1. Re:Does Intel sound a bit desperate? by Lady+Galadriel · · Score: 2

      Agreed.

      Both my newish miniture media server and pretty old desktop use AMD, on purpose, to avoid Intel's lies. And to encourge competition. (It does help they were also not too expensive...)

      Unfortunately my laptop has Intel inside. Mostly because good or in-expensive AMD laptops did not exist in early 2014 when I bought it. Of course it's taken a huge performance hit when I do the Gentoo Emerge update. So my next laptop will almost certainly be AMD. And if not, it must not have Intel hyper-threading with security issues. (Or I will simple disable Intel's hyper-threading like OpenBSD does.)

      --
      Lady Galadriel
    2. Re:Does Intel sound a bit desperate? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Aw shit, Intel's stock price is going to tank because gweihir isn't buying their latest CPU!

  16. Re:Programmers are limited by C/C++ and themselves by jellomizer · · Score: 1

    Threads are not always the only answer to parallelism. With tools like OpenCL that takes advantages of GPU cores we can take more of a SIMD (Single Instruction Multi-Data) approach to coding.
    In many ways this makes it easier, because there is less of a timing issue and conflicts that can go on. Because you are sending one instruction at a time, however it in parallel are doing it with multiable data sets.

    --
    If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
  17. Put it in the libraries / servers, and use them by raymorris · · Score: 2

    Most applications spend most of their time in standard libraries, or should. (Some silly developers implement sort themselves, repeatedly).

    If popular libraries used parallel programming, applications would get most of the benefit for free. Sorting is a good example because it's expensive, but like many expensive operations it's already implemented in the library.

    A huge percentage of code is now run behind a web server, as a web service / microservice / whatever, or some other type of server. The developers write code that Apache or IIS or MS-SQL calls, with the server handling requests. If the API for these types of modules assumed that each request is independent, disallowing modules / scripts reaching outside of the concurrency-safe context without a special global_ call, that could go a long way.

    Again I'm not saying that IIS or SQL Server would make it *impossible* to effect global state, but doing so would be a special call, with the normal API being thread safe.

    1. Re:Put it in the libraries / servers, and use them by DidgetMaster · · Score: 2

      This is precisely the kind of project I am working on. It is a new data management system that performs many operations in parallel. Some databases, for example are multi-threaded but only in the sense that they can run multiple, separate queries in parallel. They can't break up a single query and run parts of it on separate cores for faster processing. If you run a big query on a quad-core CPU it will take the same amount of time as running it on a 10-core CPU (assuming similar clock speeds).

      My system on the other hand can run parts of the query in separate threads so I get about a 50% speed improvement when processing a query against a relational table on a hex-core vs a quad-core CPU. It does the same thing when dealing with things like lists, bitmaps, or key-value stores. All is implemented in the library, so applications get the speed improvement without needing to create the threads themselves.

  18. "a focus on AI performance" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    *VOMIT*. Can we draw and quarter every marketing drone in the tech sector yet?

  19. Intel Atom by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    What a steaming piece of shit. No thanks Intel.

  20. You're right. I should have used a better word by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Assume I meant SIMD, threads, and everything like that. Parallel programming, as I said.

  21. Web Workers by tepples · · Score: 1

    Servers: could be multithreaded, but in practice many loads are not.

    At least for web servers, PHP runs in a multiprocess model, and the PostgreSQL or MariaDB server runs in a separate process.

    Browsers: JavaScript.

    Script is multithreaded by operating in multiple documents, and even script within one document is multithreaded through Web Workers.

  22. Has Intel effectively killed Hyper-Threads? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    There is no announcement at all on Intel fixing the Hyper-thread security issues.

    Instead of fixing the Hyper-thread security issues, and relaunch a more robust version of it, it looks like Intel has taken the easy way out, with their apparent abandoning of Hyper-thread.

    RIP, Hyper-thread !!

  23. Most complex software is multithread. by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

    The biggest problem I see that most software is build around single threads.

    That's not a big problem, because most single-thread software doesn't consume much CPU. Most software which does need a lot of CPU is parallelizable, and in fact that has already been done. CODECs, compression algorithms, compiles, renders, photoshop filters... all are already multithreaded.

    For the average user, literally the only thing they are doing which would benefit from more single thread performance is gaming. Ultimately gaming still comes down to single threads for single jobs, like rendering. That's why you get better minimum frame rates with Intel than with AMD, the superior single thread performance. That assumes, of course, that you haven't been owned and had Satan summoned all over your hard drive because you were running Intel.

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"