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10nm and 7nm chips this year, honest

INTEL MIGHT APPEAR to be having a tough time, with AMD’s Ryzen taking big bites out of the PC market, but the tech giant has big plans for 2019. Of most interest is that we will finally get to see its new 10nm chip using the Sunny Cove architecture, Intel’s first all-new design since Skylake in 2015.

We don’t have many details, just a few slides shown at its Architecture Day event. It will have 50 percent more L1 cache, and “significantly” larger key structures, buffers, and so forth. It has a wider front end—that is, more paths—and can run two stores per cycle. It also gets an extra Address Generation Unit, a second Load Effective Address unit, 10 ports instead of eight, and a second shuffle unit, all adding up to more performance per cycle. We will also see the next generation of UHD graphics, hinted to be twice as fast.

Sunny Cove is unlikely to be completely 10nm; Intel has a modular system called Foveros that enables it to mix and match silicon. Eventually, Sunny Cove will appear in everything from Xeon server chips through to Core-brand mainstream parts. Also due this year from Intel is Cooper Lake, a successor to Cascade Lake.

The arrival of Sunny Cove can’t come too soon, as AMD has confirmed a spring 2019 launch for its 7nm Zen 2 architecture. It’s also modular, with 14nm elements to keep costs down. It’s already out there as engineering samples; early reports claim around a 13 percent speed increase clock for clock on a 4GHz part.

Of more immediate interest are new Coffee Lake chips without integrated graphics: the Core i9-9900KF, i7-9700KF, i5-9600K, and i5-9400F. It’s unlikely that Intel has a new wafer here, rather disabled the on-board graphics of existing chips, which does mean you can sell chips where the UHD graphics component has failed, but all else is well. The good news is that prices will undercut the current versions, and they will be able to cope with a little more thermal load.