Intel’s first major CPU core update in years kicks the chip giant back into high gear. Meet Sunny Cove.
Long criticized for reusing old cores in its recent CPUs, Intel on Wednesday showed off a new 10nm Sunny Cove core that will bring faster single-threaded and multi-threaded performance along with major speed bumps from new instructions.
Sunny Cove, which many believe will go into Intel’s upcoming Ice Lake-U CPUs early next year, will be “deeper, wider, and smarter,” said Ronak Singhal, director of Intel’s Architecture Cores Group.
Intel laid out its planned core map through the year 2022
Singhal said the three approaches should boost the performance of Sunny Cove CPUs. By doing “deeper,” Sunny Cove cores find greater opportunities for parallelism by increasing the cache sizes. “Wider” means the new cores will execute more operations in parallel. Compared to the Skylake architecture (which is also the basis of Kaby Lake and Coffee Lake chips), the chip goes from a 4-wide design to 5-wide.
Intel says Sunny Cove also increases performance in specialized tasks by adding new instructions that will improve the speed of cryptography and AI and machine learning.
In one demo the company showed a Sunny Cove CPU performing a 7-Zip encode using AES-256. It ran up to 75 percent faster than an equivalent current Intel CPU, but with a catch: The demonstration used a version of 7-Zip that was recompiled to take advantage of Sunny Cove’s instructions. Other changes include specialized instructions to improve performance of vector processing, compression, and decompression.
Intel’s upcoming Sunny Cove cores will feature improved encryption performance to the tune of about 75 percent over current products in the same power and thermal envelope.
