Intel is inching closer to its December 12 "2018 Architecture Day" event targeted at assuring investors and channel partners that its short-term and intermediate-term CPU architecture roadmap looks competitive, by even demonstrating early prototypes of future architectures. One such exhibit revealed a processor demo platform codenamed "Sunnycove." It's not clear if this is a derivative of an upcoming CPU architecture (such as "Ice Lake,") or if it's the first fundamentally new CPU core design since "Nehalem."

The numbers put out by Intel scream "up to 75% more 7-zip performance," without elaborating whether they mean compression, decompression, or encryption. Speaking of the latter, this chip has some serious encryption chops, including support for new encryption instruction-sets that include SHA-NI (secure hash algorithm new instructions), and vector-AES. Much of the chip is designed to accelerate encryption, and its applications could be focused on the enterprise.