New Core Roadmap
Although nobody would explicitly say so at the event, Intel has essentially halted any volume-production plans it might have had for the Cannon Lake microarchitecture introduced with the Core i3-8121U. The first next-generation core built on the 10-nm process that Intel is confident enough to talk about in detail is called Sunny Cove, a name that refers only to the CPU core and not the SoCs that the company plans to build around it. That said, and despite some taciturn responses to questioning on this point at the event, I’m confident in saying that the first 10-nm processors that Intel plans to introduce in volume will fly the Ice Lake code name.
New graphics
In 2015, Intel launched the Skylake processor with Gen9 integrated graphics. Rather than moving straight to Gen10 the next time around, we were given Gen 9.5 in both Kaby Lake and Coffee Lake, which supposedly draw features from what would have been Gen 10. Actually, the graphics for Intel’s failed 10nm Cannon Lake chip were meant to be called Gen10, however Intel never released a Cannon Lake processor with working integrated graphics, and because Gen11 goes above and beyond what Gen10 would have been, we’ve gone straight to Gen11.
Most prominently, Intel wants to establish a teraflop of single-precision floating-point throughput as the baseline level of performance users can expect from GT2 configurations of Gen11. Compared to the roughly 440 GFLOPS (and yes, that’s giga with a G) available from the UHD 620 graphics processor in a broad swath of basic systems on the market today, that kind of performance improvement on a platform with as much reach as Intel’s integrated graphics processors could bring enjoyable gameplay to a far broader audience than ever before.
Gen11 is the first Intel graphics processor with support for the long-promised and long-awaited VESA Adaptive Sync standard. Variable-refresh-rate displays are a mature technology at this point, but it’s still welcome to see relatively modest graphics processors like GT2 driving compatible monitors in a tear-free fashion. Intel also claims that its Adaptive Sync-compatible IGPs will include desirable features like low framerate compensation from the get-go.
Intel XE Discrete Graphics
Intel will use the Xe branding for its range of graphics that were unofficially called ‘Gen12’ in previous discussions. Xe will start from 2020 onwards, and cover the range from client graphics all the way to datacenter graphics solutions.
It’s good to see Intel starting to share some stuff about their roadmaps and architectures again, this is what people want to hear about.
I’m personally most excited for Adaptive-sync on the iGPU and their upcoming discrete graphics.
A third player in the GPU scene is much needed, and hopefully with Intel supporting adaptive sync Nvidia will have to support it too, eventually.
On the CPU battlegrounds, Ice-Lake vs Zen 2 shaping up to one hell of a fight in 2019.