Thursday, May 9th 2019
Intel "Tiger Lake" Architecture Combines Willow Cove CPU Cores and Xe iGPU
Even as Intel banks on 10 nm "Ice Lake" to pull it out of the 14 nm dark ages, the company is designing a fascinating new monolithic processor SoC die that succeeds it. Codenamed "Tiger Lake," and slated to debut in 2020, this die packs "Willow Cove" CPU cores and an iGPU based on Intel's Xe architecture, not Gen11. "Willow Cove" CPU cores are more advanced than the "Sunny Cove" cores "Ice Lake" packs, featuring a redesigned on-die cache, additional security features, and transistor optimization yielded from the newer 10 nm+ silicon fabrication process.
Intel is already boasting of 1 TFLOP/s compute power of the Gen11 iGPU on "Ice Lake," so it's logical to predict that the Xe based iGPU will be significantly faster. It will also support the latest display standards. The "next-gen I/O" referenced by Intel could be faster NVMe, Thunderbolt, and USB standards that leverage the bandwidth doubling brought about by PCI-Express gen 4.0. Here's the catch: much like "Ice Lake," the new "Tiger Lake" chip will get a mobile debut as Tiger Lake-Y or Tiger Lake-U, and desktop processors could follow later, possibly even 2021, depending on how much pressure it faces from AMD.
Intel is already boasting of 1 TFLOP/s compute power of the Gen11 iGPU on "Ice Lake," so it's logical to predict that the Xe based iGPU will be significantly faster. It will also support the latest display standards. The "next-gen I/O" referenced by Intel could be faster NVMe, Thunderbolt, and USB standards that leverage the bandwidth doubling brought about by PCI-Express gen 4.0. Here's the catch: much like "Ice Lake," the new "Tiger Lake" chip will get a mobile debut as Tiger Lake-Y or Tiger Lake-U, and desktop processors could follow later, possibly even 2021, depending on how much pressure it faces from AMD.
14 Comments on Intel "Tiger Lake" Architecture Combines Willow Cove CPU Cores and Xe iGPU
We know AMD is planning Navi and Arcturus after it. Having multiple things on roadmap does not automatically make things vapourware. I would also bring example from Nvidia but we only know Ampere from them at this point.
Nothing new and certainly nothing that is going to make any difference.
Patents should not be a problem for Intel. They have extensive cross-licensing agreements with both AMD and Nvidia and they have been doing R&D on GPUs throughout years including some of their own patents.
By the way, 'nothing there to admire' is not the same as 'hate'. Hating happens in Youtube emo videos.
If we only count on AMD to shadow Nvidia, we'll have dark years ahead of us in that chapter.
GPU part of Tegras has always been at least good enough, usually very good. Matches what you would expect from Nvidia who are GPU company after all.
CPU part is the problem. History of Tegra is closely related to Project Denver which was a failure and took years to get somewhere. Tegra was intended to have Denver for CPU (which is an interesting bit in CPU history) but the design for that took more and more time so Nvidia hastily replaced the CPU with ARM cores and not always good and suitable ones. There is a lot unknown in this but where Denver started was Transmeta-like instruction set translation from x86 into its own internal instructions. There is suspicion that current iterations simply do the same for ARM. This was a part of Nvidia's attempt in going for x86 which failed not so much for technical reasons but largely because Nvidia was unable to secure x86 licensing from Intel. It does perform quite good. The problem is that this form factor is niche. It is a tablet SoC and a big, power-hungry one at that. There is no market for this. Tablets are in decline and market is in smaller, lighter tablets that do not need that much power. Nvidia is struggling to find a use for Tegra - it goes into automotive, AI and other specific use cases but not with much success. On the other hand, they have not given up on Tegra yet.
Now that I think of it, this might not be as offtopic as it seems. Lakefield on that slide is Intel's next attempt at SoC. What market it is aimed at, I am not sure but low-power laptops and big tablets might fit the bill.