Quote:Intel today unveiled its first clean-slate CPU core micro-architecture since "Nehalem," codenamed "Sunny Cove." Over the past decade, the 9-odd generations of Core processors were based on incrementally refined descendants of "Nehalem," running all the way down to "Coffee Lake." Intel now wants a clean-slate core design, much like AMD "Zen" is a clean-slate compared to "Stars" or to a large extent even "Bulldozer." This allows Intel to introduce significant gains in IPC (single-thread performance) over the current generation. Intel's IPC growth curve over the past three micro-architectures has remained flat, and only grew single-digit percentages over the generations prior.
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The first products featuring "Sunny Cove" cores is slated as early as by 2019, and will be built on Intel's 10 nm DUV silicon fabrication process. Intel didn't stop at "Sunny Cove," and went on to mention two of its successors. "Willow Cove" is an incremental update, letting its designers eke out more effective IPC by improving on-die caches, transistor optimization, and the addition of new security features. In many ways, "Sunnycove" and "Willow Cove" relate to each other like AMD's "Zen" and "Zen+." The first "Willow Cove" based processors will launch in 2020, based on a refined 10 nm process node.

Lastly there's "Golden Cove," slated for 2021. Here Intel could take advantage of a newer silicon fabrication process (either an extremely refined 10 nm-derivative or even 7 nm EUV), to increase IPC (single-thread performance). In addition, Intel will improve the core's "AI performance" (probably the ability to multiply matrices), and improved host-signal processing for 5G and networking.

Quote:Sunny Cove is codename for Intel's first truly new performance CPU core design since "Skylake," and made its debut with the company's 10 nm "Ice Lake" processors, packing the first tangible IPC increase in years. VLSI guru Jim Keller is leading the effort to build Intel's future CPU core designs, and dropped a big hint on what to expect, speaking at a gathering in U.C. Berkeley. It's unclear which specific core Keller is referring to. The immediate successor to "Sunny Cove" is codenamed "Willow Cove," and Intel's own public sketch hints at an incremental upgrade over Sunny Cove, with faster caches and process-level optimization. It's only with "Golden Cove," slated for 2021, that Intel speaks of its next round of IPC increases (dubbed "ST perf"). It's plausible that Keller is referring to this core since a 2021 launch would fit better with a 2018-19 design phase.

In his talk, Keller describes Intel's next big CPU core as being "significantly bigger" than "Sunny Cove," with its 800-wide instruction window, and "massive" data- and branch-predictors, to put Intel back on a linear performance growth trajectory between generations. Keller also commented on this being a "mindset change" at Intel, which over the past decade, only delivered minor IPC increments between generations, and focused on other areas, such as efficiency. In stark contrast, through the 1990s and 2000s, Intel delivered IPC leaps between generations, such as the one between "Netburst" and "Conroe," and onwards to "Nehalem." These were in-part helped by rapid process advancements that slowed in the 2010s as Intel approached the sub-10 nm scale.