Intel just gave everyone a taste of what’s to come. Meet the new Sunny Cove processors of 2019, featuring a new microarchitecture that should effectively replace the Skylake processors behind servers, laptops, desktops, and perhaps even future MacBooks.
There are two main types of improvements Intel considers when designing a new core, according to Ronak Singhal, Intel Fellow and director for CPU computing architecture. The first, of course, is “out of the box performance,” which literally means gains users get simply by replacing the CPU with a new one.
The second kind, and also more critical to the development of Sunny Cove, is what Singhal calls “targeted algorithms” for the instruction set of the cores. This is the facilitator between the CPU’s hardware and the software on the storage drive. Intel aimed to improve the instruction set in three contexts: cryptography, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. This essentially means developers could see major improvements writing, testing, and running their programs on Sunny Cove chips as opposed to platforms with Skylake or AMD processors.
Intel describes the chips as being “deeper, wider, and smarter,” and in addition to performance gains, they’ll also use less power than their predecessors.
The chips come after a number of delays in what could be called as one of the roughest years for Intel so far. Intel had also originally scheduled 10-nanometer mass production as early as 2015, but that never came to pass. Now, however, the company is finally promising 10nm processors in consumers’ hands by mid-2019.
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