Thursday, August 13th 2020

Intel Delivers Advances Across 6 Pillars of Technology, Powering Our Leadership Product Roadmap

At Intel, we truly believe in the potential of technology to enrich lives and change the world. This has been a guiding principle since the company was founded. It started with the PC era, when technology enabled the mass digitization of knowledge and networking, bringing 1 billion people onto the internet. Then came the mobile and cloud era, a disruption that changed the way we live. We now have over 10 billion devices connected to supercomputers in the cloud.

We believe the next era will be the intelligent era. An era where we will experience 100 billion intelligent connected devices. Exascale performance and architecture will make this intelligence available to all, enriching our lives in more ways than we can imagine today. This is a future that inspires and motivates me and my fellow Intel architects every day.
We are generating data at a faster rate than our current ability to analyze, understand, transmit, secure and reconstruct it in real time. Analyzing a ton of data requires a ton of compute. More important, for this data to help us with insights, it needs access to compute in real time, which means low-latency, close to the user. At Intel, we are on a journey to solve this exponentially hard problem.

Since the end of the Dennard scaling era, extracting the exponential value from transistor technology inspired us to look at new approaches across the whole stack. This led us to what we call our Six Pillars of Technology Innovation, which we introduced at our Architecture Day in December 2018. We believe that delivering advances across these pillars is necessary to continue the exponential essence of Moore's Law.

This week, at Architecture Day 2020, we showcased how we are taking this forward with a broad range of exciting new breakthroughs. We have made great progress with our diverse mix of scalar, vector, matrix and spatial architectures - designed with state-of-the-art process technology, fed by disruptive memory hierarchies, integrated into systems with advanced packaging, deployed at hyperscale with lightspeed interconnect links, unified by a single software abstraction, and developed with benchmark defining security features.

We provided more details about our disaggregated design methodology and our advanced packaging roadmap. We demonstrated our mastering of fine bump pitches in EMIB and Foveros technologies through several product iterations in graphics and FPGAs, and on the client with Lakefield.

We also shared one of the most exciting advancements in our transistor roadmap by introducing our new 10 nm SuperFin technology, a redefinition of the FinFET with new SuperMIM capacitors that enables the largest single, intranode enhancement in Intel's history, delivering performance improvements comparable to a full-node transition and enabling a leadership product roadmap.

When we integrate our next-generation Willow Cove CPU architecture with our 10 nm SuperFin technology, the result is the incredible new Tiger Lake platform. We unpacked details of the upcoming Tiger Lake system-on-chip architecture, which provides a generational leap in CPU performance, leadership graphics, leadership artificial intelligence (AI), more memory bandwidth, additional security features, better display, better video and more. I know everyone is eager for all of the details on Tiger Lake and we look forward to sharing more in the coming weeks.

In addition to Tiger Lake, we provided a deep dive into our next generation Intel Agilex FPGA, which provides breakthrough performance per watt. In fact, we showcased two generations of disaggregated products using EMIB and shared the first results of our 224 Gbps transceivers.

We also highlighted how Intel's Xe GPU architecture is the foundation that helps us build GPUs that are scalable from teraflops to petaflops. Xe-LP powers leadership graphics in Tiger Lake and is our most efficient microarchitecture for PC and mobile computing platforms. Xe-LP also powers our first discrete GPU in more than 20 years, codenamed DG1. This GPU is now in production. We also introduced the first Intel server GPU, powered by Xe-LP. This GPU will ship later this year and deliver class-leading stream density and visual quality for media transcode and streaming.

On the data center front, we announced that our first?Xe-HP chip is sampling to customers. Xe-HP is the industry's first multitiled, highly scalable, high-performance GPU architecture, providing petaflop-scale AI performance and rack-level media performance in a single package based on our EMIB technology. Xe-HP will leverage enhanced SuperFin technology.

And, our enthusiast and gamer friends, we heard your requests for Xe for enthusiast gaming. We added a fourth microarchitecture to the Xe family: Xe-HPG optimized for gaming, with many new graphics features including ray tracing support. We expect to ship this microarchitecture in 2021 and I can't wait to get my hands on this GPU!

On software, we have talked before about our vision for providing developers a unified, standards-based programming model across all our XPU architectures. We are executing on that vision with our oneAPI Gold release available later this year. We also announced that we are offering DG1 early access to developers in Intel DevCloud, enabling them start developing with oneAPI without need for any setups, downloads and hardware installs.
Since our last Architecture Day, we have made some big steps in memory. Most recently, as part of the 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor launch (code-named "Cooper Lake"), we announced our 2nd Gen Intel Optanepersistent memory product (code-named "Barlow Pass"). We also remain on track to move Intel's 4-bit-per-cell QLC into production by the end of 2020.

We also took a deeper look at how we are advancing security amid a constantly evolving threat landscape. This includes the introduction of new technologies, such Intel Control-Flow Enforcement Technology, which delivers CPU-level security structures to help protect against common malware attack methods. And, we gave the first look at our longer-term vision around foundational security, workload protection and software reliability.

We have made major progress in advancing interconnect, too. Intel announced in March 2019 that it was working with the industry for broad support for Compute Express Link, designed to accelerate next-generation data center performance and to be offered in Sapphire Rapids. We have also had a significant lead with silicon photonics in terms of customer engagements, and as the data center continues its transformation, Intel is addressing their needs through leadership speeds and foundational and SmartNIC products for network processing offloads.

Our Intel fellows and architects are passionately working on technology for 2021, 2022 and beyond. We provided a glimpse into our product vision for client and data center leveraging for all six pillars and disaggregated design. Our head of Intel Labs also provided a look at where emerging research areas can get us 100x to 1000x improvements in compute efficiency, including a sneak peek at neuromorphic architectures being researched in our world-leading labs.
For decades, Intel has been at the center of the technology industry. Our products, along with those of our customers, have reshaped the way we all work, live and play. But our collective journey is far from over. I believe we are at the start of a new era, an intelligent era, an exascale for everyone era. This era will be powered by unprecedented levels of compute performance and disruptions across all Six Pillars of Technology Innovation.

The complete slide deck follows.
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39 Comments on Intel Delivers Advances Across 6 Pillars of Technology, Powering Our Leadership Product Roadmap

#1
Raevenlord
News Editor
Raja seems to have done pretty well for himself.
Posted on Reply
#2
Verpal
I only got one question left, will Intel XE dGPU work with XE iGPU? If the answer is yes, potentially it can help both CPU and GPU sales and create an Apple like ecosystem.
Posted on Reply
#3
Vya Domus
Still rather lackluster detailed information for some products that are supposedly coming later this year.
Posted on Reply
#4
dicktracy
Their future in GPUs look bright. Finally a competent competitor for Nvidia, who’s enjoying almost a decade of free reign.
Posted on Reply
#5
Caring1
That "pillar" reminds me of Jenga, who's going to be the one to topple it.
Posted on Reply
#7
ZoneDymo
dicktracyTheir future in GPUs look bright. Finally a competent competitor for Nvidia, who’s enjoying almost a decade of free reign.
seriously man, will you ever get a life or just keep being obsessed with AMD?
Posted on Reply
#8
dicktracy
ZoneDymoseriously man, will you ever get a life or just keep being obsessed with AMD?
Talks about AMD when my comment isn’t about AMD. Good job with the fanaticism.
Posted on Reply
#9
Vayra86
ZoneDymoseriously man, will you ever get a life or just keep being obsessed with AMD?
This time he's not wrong though

But I have my doubts Intel can pull it off,tbh
Posted on Reply
#10
ZoneDymo
dicktracyTalks about AMD when my comment isn’t about AMD. Good job with the fanaticism.
oh really, tell me, what is it about then? what is this company that is "less then competent" and "not competing with Nvidia" and allowing this "decade free reign"?
Your comment history also paints a picture of your AMD obsession btw.
Vayra86This time he's not wrong though

But I have my doubts Intel can pull it off,tbh
Explain the first part
Posted on Reply
#11
chodaboy19
This is all great, but intel needs to ship products.
Posted on Reply
#12
phanbuey
theoneandonlymrkSeems like Raja brought the hype trains with him.
Pretty sure Raja is actually the hype train. When Raja makes coffee in the morning, it's the best, most advanced coffee yet.
Posted on Reply
#13
Philaphlous
Wait...did Raja change his shirt mid-presentation?
Posted on Reply
#14
lexluthermiester
dicktracyTheir future in GPUs look bright. Finally a competent competitor for Nvidia, who’s enjoying almost a decade of free reign.
Another competitor, certainly. Competent? That depends on your context. XE will likely be a solid entry into the GPU market, but lets not kid ourselves, it will not be on par with anything NVidia or AMD upper mid-range or top tier. They are going to be playing catch-up for many years to come. However, such competition will be good for the industry as a whole.
Posted on Reply
#15
Vayra86
ZoneDymooh really, tell me, what is it about then? what is this company that is "less then competent" and "not competing with Nvidia" and allowing this "decade free reign"?
Your comment history also paints a picture of your AMD obsession btw.



Explain the first part
Does it really need explaining? Nvidia is enjoying thought leadership for at least a decade now. AMD follows suit. The examples are there for everyone to see and still stacking up. Is that incompetence, I wouldn't say so, but it sure isn't leadership. And yes, AMD has its share of examples of incompetence too, there is a rich history of PR and strategical blunders.

Remember, even a broken clock is right twice a day.
Posted on Reply
#16
Tomorrow
chodaboy19This is all great, but intel needs to ship products.
This. The fact that they "announce a roapmap" is laughable. Didnt you guys have one before?
Smells almost as Star Citizen level BS announcing a roadmap for a roadmap.

Others would add roadmap to their overall presentation when launching actual products not announce the roadmap as the only thing in of itself.
And apparently Intel has Leadership...in roadmaps.
Posted on Reply
#17
Steevo
Every mention on a product ends with a hard left turn into some other non related product with big numbers.

Where are the demo samples and third party benchmarks? Until then its all smoke and mirrors just like he did at AMD.
Posted on Reply
#18
ZoneDymo
Vayra86Does it really need explaining? Nvidia is enjoying thought leadership for at least a decade now. AMD follows suit. The examples are there for everyone to see and still stacking up. Is that incompetence, I wouldn't say so, but it sure isn't leadership. And yes, AMD has its share of examples of incompetence too, there is a rich history of PR and strategical blunders.

Remember, even a broken clock is right twice a day.
Im merely saying that in the last decade we had HD6000 series, HD7000, R290, RX480/580, Vega56, RX5700(XT) which are all fantastic cards and often better choices then the competition soooo yeah.
To suddenly deny competence and competitiveness there is well just being wrong.
Posted on Reply
#19
prtskg
When I see Raja speaking about his products, I can't forget 'Poor Volta'.
Posted on Reply
#20
Unregistered
It'd be nice to have this edited for useless wording.
That's way too much text for what info was given...ffs
Posted on Edit | Reply
#21
xtreemchaos
i dont know if im paranoid but i dont trust a word thay say and im a intel fan and a Amd fan well a fan of anything with wires in and looks purdy :) .where can i get some rbg for my straight jacket.
Posted on Reply
#22
PowerPC
When Intel weak, marketing strong.
Posted on Reply
#23
bpgt64
VerpalI only got one question left, will Intel XE dGPU work with XE iGPU? If the answer is yes, potentially it can help both CPU and GPU sales and create an Apple like ecosystem.
I think my brain just melted...what does that even mean. Apple (Untill very recently, and in the 90s) has used other hardware providers and limited sku's supported to there advantage..how does using Intel XE ...for anything create an Apple like ecosystem?
Posted on Reply
#24
AnarchoPrimitiv
VerpalI only got one question left, will Intel XE dGPU work with XE iGPU? If the answer is yes, potentially it can help both CPU and GPU sales and create an Apple like ecosystem.
AMD already implemented that years ago with what amounted to basically crossfire between an AMD dGPU and the iGPU in their APUs, but it never worked well and basically can't because the communication between the two has so much latency due to how long it has to travel
ZoneDymoseriously man, will you ever get a life or just keep being obsessed with AMD?
Nobody is more obsessed with AMD than Nvidia fans
Posted on Reply
#25
efikkan
Too few specifics for me to be really interesting, except for some details about their 10nm improvements.
PowerPCWhen Intel weak, marketing strong.
Design wins and pillars to the rescue!
(for those wondering, one pillar is worth about 27 design wins)
Posted on Reply
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