A six-core mainstream Intel CPU at last?

Tick-Tock is dead. Long live Process, Architecture, Optimization. It’s no secret that the whole chip industry is now having trouble keeping up with Moore’s Law, hence Intel dropping its Tick-Tock cadence, and with it, a commitment to die-shrink its CPUs every other year.

However, what is a little surprising are rumours involving yet another 14nm CPU architecture to follow the freshly-minted Kaby Lake. The first 14nm family was, of course, Broadwell, which begat Skylake, which was, in turn, usurped by the aforementioned Kaby Lake. But the latest leaked CPU road maps from Intel indicate a hitherto unknown family of chips called Coffee Lake.

Nothing is certain, but the indications are that Coffee Lake will be 14nm. That’s a surprise in itself, but the really intriguing development is the addition of a six-core Coffee Lake model for mainstream sockets. If true, it will be the first six-core mainstream chip from Intel for desktop PCs. The six-core chip will also find its way into laptop PCs.

We can’t help noting that the emergence of Coffee Lake coincides with AMD nearing launch with its Zen architecture. Already, it seems, Zen is influencing the CPU market for the better. A mainstream six-core CPU from Intel is long, long overdue, and almost certainly hasn’t happened before because AMD hasn’t put Intel under any pressure for the past five years or so.

Coffee Lake is due in 2018, so a little after Intel’s first 10nm chips, known as Cannon Lake, and penciled in for late 2017, albeit only for mobile PCs. One major change with Cannon Lake is embedding the PCH chip in the CPU die, making Cannon Lake more or less a full-fledged SoC, or System-on-a-Chip.

That will be very interesting from a mobile PC perspective, in terms of power consumption and packaging. It should enable some fairly exotic designs in terms of compactness, and squeezing true desktop performance into smaller designs than ever before.

Beyond that, relatively little is known about Cannon Lake, or indeed its 10nm successor, Ice Lake. Talk of eight-core Cannon Lake chips has circulated, but at this stage, that is highly speculative. Given that Cannon Lake is ostensibly just a die shrink of Kaby Lake, it’s perhaps Ice Lake that you might expect to bring major architectural innovations. But given the flux Intel’s road maps have suffered of late, we wouldn’t rule anything out over the next year or three.