Intel Officially Reveals Post-8th Generation Core Architecture Code Name: Ice Lake, Built On 10nm+ (anandtech.com) 95
Intel has confirmed the existence of a new processor family called Ice Lake that will be made on Intel's 10nm+ process. The company published basic information on the Ice Lake architecture on their codename decoder. AnandTech reports: This is an unexpected development as the company has yet to formally detail (let alone launch) the first 10nm Core architecture -- Cannon Lake -- and it's rare these days for Intel to talk more than a generation ahead in CPU architectures. Equally as interesting is the fact that Intel is calling Ice Lake the successor to their upcoming 8th generation Coffee Lake processors, which codename bingo aside, throws some confusion on where the 14nm Coffee Lake and 10nm Cannon Lake will eventually stand. As a refresher, the last few generations of Core have been Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, Broadwell, Haswell, Skylake, with Kaby Lake being the latest and was recently released at the top of the year. Kaby Lake is Intel's third Core product produced using a 14nm lithography process, specifically the second-generation '14 PLUS' (or 14+) version of Intel's 14nm process.
Working purely on lithographic nomenclature, Intel has three processes on 14nm: 14, 14+, and 14++. As shown to everyone at Intel's Technology Manufacturing Day a couple of months ago, these will be followed by a trio of 10nm processes: 10nm, 10nm+ (10+), and 10++. On the desktop, Core processors will go from 14 to 14+ to 14++, such that we move from Skylake to Kaby Lake to Coffee Lake. On the Laptop side, this goes from 14 to 14+ to 14++/10, such that we move from Skylake to Kaby Lake to Coffee Lake like the desktops, but also that at some time during the Coffee Lake generation, Cannon Lake will also be launched for laptops. The next node for both after this is 10+, which will be helmed by the Ice Lake architecture.
Working purely on lithographic nomenclature, Intel has three processes on 14nm: 14, 14+, and 14++. As shown to everyone at Intel's Technology Manufacturing Day a couple of months ago, these will be followed by a trio of 10nm processes: 10nm, 10nm+ (10+), and 10++. On the desktop, Core processors will go from 14 to 14+ to 14++, such that we move from Skylake to Kaby Lake to Coffee Lake. On the Laptop side, this goes from 14 to 14+ to 14++/10, such that we move from Skylake to Kaby Lake to Coffee Lake like the desktops, but also that at some time during the Coffee Lake generation, Cannon Lake will also be launched for laptops. The next node for both after this is 10+, which will be helmed by the Ice Lake architecture.
Go to FUD when you don't have the goods (Score:5, Insightful)
Coffee Lake is looking like a loser vs Ryzen only thing it's holding its own is single thread performance
Not surprising that Intel would try to shift the focus to things that don't exist yet.
Re:Go to FUD when you don't have the goods (Score:5, Funny)
It's even funnier that they're trying to focus on things past their own next-future product which isn't even out either.
Can you imagine Toyota telling us about their new 2019 cars in mid-2017? ... or is it already happening and Intel are just copying car companies now? I have no idea since I don't have cable or satellite, I don't read newspapers. And to continue with the stereotyping, I'm also a vegan.
Re:Go to FUD when you don't have the goods (Score:5, Funny)
And to continue with the stereotyping, I'm also a vegan.
You forgot to mention that you don't have a Facebook account.
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What's Facebook?
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That's true. No Facebook, Twitter or whatever. Heck I don't even have a Slashdot account!
Re:Go to FUD when you don't have the goods (Score:4, Informative)
It's even funnier that they're trying to focus on things past their own next-future product which isn't even out either. Can you imagine Toyota telling us about their new 2019 cars in mid-2017?
Well the devil's advocate could say that you want them to only focus on next quarter's profits. Intel has always talked to investors and technology analysts about their road map, their code names and process architecture has never been directed at consumers. Let's compare them to the competition, how long before the release of an actual Zen processor did AMD start to hype it up? Announced in May 2015, released in March 2017. Or if you want to do the car analogy, how long from Musk announced the Model 3 until the first one rolled off the assembly line? July 2014 to July 2017.
The reason we are discussing Intel's road map now is that we don't quite believe them anymore. They used to have a tick-tock, now it's like 2014 14nm, 2015 14nm, 2016 14nm+, 2017 14nm++. Those two years that were supposed to become three (process-architecture-enhancement) is now four, sure it's damage control. But it's not really damage control directed at consumers, this is talking to the stock market saying we've been enhancing the product we have and we got a plan. Nothing particularly unexpected here, but exclude the 10nm and redraw the progress lines and they're slipping...
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Can you imagine Toyota telling us about their new 2019 cars in mid-2017?
Yep. Happens all the time. It takes years to spin up a new architecture.
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"Can you imagine Toyota telling us about their new 2019 cars in mid-2017? ... or is it already happening and Intel are just copying car companies now?"
That's pretty much what most automakers are telling us about their electric car roadmap.
"We have fuck-all now but we'll own the segment after 2020. #KickTeslaAss"
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If they had to build a whole new multi-billion dollar, research-intensive car plant every time they refreshed a car line, then yes.
Intel is talking a bit further out than usual but each litho generation is being stretched longer now as well. They're talking about fab plans they're finishing research on and/or starting to build NOW so they're online and working in 2019.
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Can you imagine Toyota telling us about their new 2019 cars in mid-2017
But cars don't really change much from year to year. We certainly don't see a doubling of performance in a couple years. There's nothing exciting about a car from 2019 to someone in 2017.
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Intel's business practices should be all you need to decide to support their competition.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Its not as if Intel is the only one playing this game - we had been hearing about Zen from AMD more than a year before it was released, with significant PR done on it with the resulting drum beating from the usual corners, including many users here on Slashdot.
Heres a Slashdot article from August 2016, nearly a year before the release of the first Zen architecture chips, where AMD are definitely beating their own drum:
AMD Says Upcoming Zen CPU Will Outperform Intel Broadwell-E [slashdot.org]
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I'm still waiting for a 40nm quad-core VIA C7.
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- Threadripper repeats the same pattern. Intel's HPDT was overrun. 1950X has 60% more cores than 7900X (16x/32t vs 10c/20t). It is a small miracle that 7900X is putting up the fight it does. 7900X is much more competitive with 1920X. Also, Intel has not yet managed to make price corrections in HPDT (nor bring out the reactionary 12/14/16 core CPUs).
How is it competitive against a 1920X? The 7900X costs a lot more and is outperformed in almost all tests. It requires a significantly more expensive platform, and doesn't even provide additional PCIe lanes. How is that competitive?
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only thing it's holding its own is single thread performance
Yet, this is an incredibly important metric at least until software development catches up with the hardware. Know thy use case and use the right tool for the job.
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As long as Ryzen is segfaulting under load, AMD has won jack. E.g., my employer will not be buying any workstations or servers until the problem is conclusively fixed.
If some new feature is broken (like HLE when Intel launched it), then whatever---people will simply wait to adopt the new feature. But when basic functionality is broken (like heavy compilation jobs on Ryzen), you have a serious problem.
The competition is forcing Intel to adjust their prices, but Ryzen is neither a slam dunk winner nor an unqu
Ice Lake.. (Score:5, Funny)
..because winter is coming.. err.. here?
What's with those names?! (Score:5, Funny)
Coffee Lake? Ice Lake?
What's next? Iced Coffee Lake?
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Ice Ice Baby!
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Many years ago I worked for a big name company (not Intel), and our product road maps were all based on places near the company HQ in California. The names made perfect sense to people in California because they grew up seeing the locations in national parks, etc, but our lab wasn't anywhere near California, and most of us had never even been there, so we had no clue of the cultural significance of the names.
My suggestion: Starting near Intel's HQ, find a real world map with the existing code names. When yo
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My suggestion: Google it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Because of the heat dissipation requirements, Intel is actually going to have to name this processor series Waimangu Cauldron:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Re:What's with those names?! (Score:5, Funny)
Coffee Lake? Ice Lake?
What's next? Iced Coffee Lake?
If you look at the naming history, it's "Bridge", "Well", "Lake" and soon "Creek". They haven't announced the name but it's clear by the time they offering "Ice Lake" they'll be really far up "Shit Creek" sans paddle. ;)
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10nm++ and 10nm+++:
Ice Cube Lake. Vanilla Ice Lake.
On 7nm will be:
Lava Lake. Lava Chocolate Cake Lake.
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Mocha Lake? Latte Lake? Triple, Venti, Half Sweet, Non-Fat, Caramel Macchiato Lake?
Re: What's with those names?! (Score:1)
Name should be "Octium" (Score:3)
Since it's the 8th-generation, "Octium" would be fitting. There was even a Lone Gunmen episode about it...
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Since it's the 8th-generation, "Octium" would be fitting. There was even a Lone Gunmen episode about it...
Yes, there was.
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Wait for the benchmarks and stuff, but at least in terms of single core performance, intel been stuck for quite a while, most likely because AMD had nothing to actually threat em with.
Re:What's a decent upgrade for my 2600k? (Score:5, Informative)
Intel sat on their hands for multiple generations while AMD had nothing to offer and now they're getting bit in the ass now that they have to compete again. They really should have made 6-core mainstream parts several generations ago.
Re: What's a decent upgrade for my 2600k? (Score:1)
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Basically if you're willing to spend the money to get more than 4 cores, you might consider upgrading. But if you would get another quad core (which is what you would get for the same amount of money that you spent on the 2600K), don't bother.
Intel 10 nm+ (Score:4, Funny)
They go to 11.
Intel's Problem (Score:5, Informative)
Intel has two "problem" architectures - Broadwell and Cannonlake. Both suffer from debuting on a new and untested process. Broadwell took forever and a day to make it out of the mobile sector, eventually finding its way into Xeon-D, Xeon, and HEDT products as well (not counting the mostly-unsupported and barely-mentioned Broadwell-C and Broadwell-R processors). Skylake and Kabylake were basically on the same process with uarch tweaks. Okay, Kabylake is on 14nm+ but whatever.
If you will recall, delays in the 14nm process caused Intel to re-release Haswell as Devil's Canyon, otherwise known as the i7-4790k and i5-4690k processors or "Haswell Refresh".
Intel is experiencing delays with 10nm and Cannonlake which is meant to be its debut architecture. They are using Coffeelake as a "Kabylake Refresh" since it uses the same core architecture as Kaby (and Skylake; in fact, both Kabylake and Coffeelake are Skylake refreshes). It uses a respun version of 14nm+ - 14nm++ or whatever you want to call it - and it features up to two more cores than what you can get with Kabylake.
So Cannonlake is only a definite go for mobile whenever Intel is finally ready to start selling 10nm CPUs. That could be a bit.
We may eventually see Xeon-D products, Xeon products, and HEDT products based on Cannonlake. On the desktop, we should not expect Cannonlake at all, not even a successor to the controversial Broadwell-C. So just as most Intel buyers made the jump from Haswell to Skylake, now we're going to make the jump from Skylake/Kabylake/Coffeelake to Icelake. They skipped Broadwell on the desktop (mostly), and now they're skipping Cannonlake.
The other thing that's really confusing is that Intel hasn't actually released a new uarch in awhile. Their last "new" uarch was Skylake. Skylake-X - the HEDT/server version of Skylake - is nothing but Skylake with bolt-on AVX512 functionality and a rejiggered cache configuration to make it more competitive in certain server workloads (as a consequence, Skylake-X is slower in games at any given clockspeed than Skylake/Kabylake at the same clock). All signs point to Coffeelake being planned all along as a die-shrink of Skylake to 10nm. So Skylake, Kabylake, Coffeelake, and (probably) Coffeelake ARE ALL ACTUALLY THE SAME UARCH. Weird huh?
Icelake will be the first "new" uarch Intel will have released since the debut of Skylake.
Re:Intel's Problem (Score:5, Interesting)
Probably with the AVX512 instructions. Dribbling vector instrucitons out into consumer products years after they were built into Xeon is Intel's way of touting enhanced performance. (It is, for a small handful of libraries tweaked to use them - basically Intel MKL and video libraries.) It is painfully hard to make architectural improvements these days.
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AMD (Score:5, Insightful)
Translation of the whole thing comes down to: "We are officially a little scared by what AMD is able to do right now, so we are going to lay out our future plans to kick butt."
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i wonder if AMD will also respond with some (currently vaporware) "advanced marketing" material.
Great plan (Score:3, Insightful)
When someone else starts to eat your lunch, announce vaporware. That old dodge still works.
Blowing hot air. (Score:4, Interesting)
It's quite clear that none of Intel's offerings can compete with what AMD has just released which leaves Intel playing the game it knows best: deceit. This display is merely a ploy to save face by talking about a theoretical processor they may make. I have no doubt that Intel is up to it's old anti-competitive tricks again and paying off companies to not sell computers with AMD chips and such. My only hope is that this time around they get their asses handed to them.
As a person who doesn't follow this stuff (Score:2)
Could someone explain (or point to an explanation of) the significance of the "+" and "++" in the nomenclature?
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This mentions 14+ and 14++ - https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/14_nm_lithography_process
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Thank you!
Re:As a person who doesn't follow this stuff (Score:5, Informative)
Pluses means 'slightly smaller' and/or more mature/stable, generally allowing greater chip yield and higher clock speed.
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Thanks!
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Pluses means 'slightly smaller' and/or more mature/stable, generally allowing greater chip yield and higher clock speed.
14nm - Tri-Gates - oops
14nm+ - FinFETs - tick
14nm++ - FinFETs - tock
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Plus plus (Score:1)
Global Warming (Score:2)
should make a great name for a future AMD product.
"Post-8th Generation"? (Score:2)
So, 9th generation, then?
What kind of fresh marketing bullshit is this? (Score:1)
Of course there's something else after the latest and greatest. Its not like intel is just going to say "Whoops, no more chips! Sorry!"
With this much of a marketing tie in lead, are they going to start funding new processors via presales at gamestop?