Intel and new Gen 11 “Sunny Cove” processors

Recently, Intel held an Architecture Day in California to give an overview of their plans spanning 2019 through 2021. They talked about a new CPU architecture, Sunny Cove, alluded slightly to 10nm and also talked about 3D packaging technology they have called Foveros.

Sunny Cove

There were many other topics of conversation, but perhaps the most interesting observation was that the event was hosted by Raja Koduri, most recently in charge of the Radeon Technology Group at AMD. Joining Koduri was Jim Keller, who developed the Zen architecture for AMD that is used in the current Ryzen 7, Threadripper and EPYC CPUs.

Koduri and Keller have previously worked together at Apple, so the message here is that Intel is prepared to use outsiders to reach new ideas and find a way out of the current rut where they have been unable to produce CPUs with a 10nm manufacturing process.

It wasn’t just new people, as Ronak Singhal, the Core Core Architect is an Intel Fellow and has worked at Intel for approximately 25 years. Singhal made a number of points about the current Core architecture and how the Maximum Turbo Frequency has increased from the original 4.2GHz on a single core and has now reached 5.0GHz on four cores. In other words, they may have been stuck in a 14nm manufacturing process for several years, but that doesn’t mean progress has stopped.

If you want to know more about Sunny Cove, visit the following link.