PLOTTING A ROUTE OUT OF 10NM

Intel’s roadmap to 7nm and beyond

If Intel isn’t going to be fully on track before its new 7nm node, due out late next year, and realistically not a source of really highvolume manufacturing until 2022, what are Intel’s plans to stay competitive between now and then? After all, AMD won’t be standing still and says it will release another iteration of its

Ryzen CPU, powered by Zen 3 architecture, later this year.

When it comes to Intel roadmaps of late, suffice to say that everything is subject to change. However, all the indications are that Intel will stick with 14nm for its next family of desktop processors thanks to an approach known as backporting.

Intel will take the Willow Cove architecture, originally designed for the 10nm node, and backport it to 14nm. Willow Cove is thought to offer roughly 25 percent more performance per clock than Skylake, making for very powerful CPU cores. The new chips, known as Rocket Lake, are due out later this year and are expected to top out at eight cores.

Apparently the large Willow Cove CPU cores are quite power-hungry when manufactured on 14nm, preventing Intel from going beyond eight cores. With

Rocket Lake, Intel will finally offer a desktop CPU with support for the PCI Express 4.0 interconnect.

Then comes the first 10nm architecture, Alder Lake, which gets faster Golden Cove cores. But the radical departure will be a new big.LITTLE philosophy, which combines small, power-efficient cores with larger, highperformance cores— so Atom cores alongside Golden Cove cores.