Intel unveils Sunny Cove 10nm architecture slated for 2019 - late 2019

Sunny Cove architecture will sit at heart of 10nm Core and Xeon Intel CPUs

Intel has unveiled its forthcoming Sunny Cover architecture, which will debut in 10nm Core and Xeon processors from late 2019.

The details were revealed at the company's "Architecture Day", last night. However, the company did not disclose basic information, such as clock speeds, although Intel did promise that Sunny Cove will enable more operations to be carried out in parallel and that latency will be improved. The chip maker also touted Gen11 integrated graphics, which it claimed is "designed to break the 1 TFLOPS barrier".

However, Intel did not go into a great deal of depth about its plans, aside from adding: "Architectural extensions for specific use cases and algorithms. For example, new performance-boosting instructions for cryptography, such as vector AES and SHA-NI, and other critical use cases like compression and decompression."

Intel also revealed its "Foveros" technology, which will enable 3D stacking of logic chips. This basically means that Intel will be able to make chips that are effectively built out of "chiplets", essentially constructing slices of silicon in a manner one might layer a cake.

This is, the company continued, a "radical re-architecture of systems-on-chips" as it would be the first time logic chips have been stacked, and could enable processors to be specifically built for certain tasks.

"The transistor that's best for a desktop gaming CPU is not necessarily the best transistor for a GPU. Similarly, you need different transistors for running 5G and interconnectivity," Intel's graphics boss Raja Koduri, Intel's chip architect told Wired.

"Before, we used to just take the best compromise of all of the silicon. Now, we can take processes that are best for the function and put them all together on a single package. And because we have very high bandwidth between these chips, they will function exactly as if they are a single chip."

Whether Intel's forthcoming stacking technology will help the company to finally get its 10nm process node working in volume remains to be seen. But such stacking could usher in some interesting next-gen chips, and might see Intel drive forward some innovation in its Core CPU line up.