I was fearing that this piece of "news" was going to be covered.
Now let's first check if it passes the smell test;
- The person making this have access to unreleased products from both AMD and Intel, including an early engineering sample of a 6 core Ice Lake, very unlikely.
- There is no CPU named "Sunny Cove", Sunny Cove is the core design, the first implementation is Ice Lake, so this is obviously wrong.
- Some of these clocks are fairly optimistic.
So most likely a fake.
And even if the benchmarks were accurate, >40% gain in a benchmark does not mean 40% higher "IPC". IPC should never be estimated based on a single workload, but a good selection of representative workloads. Even if Ice Lake truly yields 18% higher IPC, that doesn't mean every score will increase by 18% per clock, some may be only 5% while others are >40%, it all depends on which part of the CPU the benchmark stresses.
18% over four years is pretty terrible, especially if you consider how much performance was lost because of security mitigations.
~18% would be comparable to Sandy Bridge -> Skylake, which is no small achievement.
Performance loss from security mitigations are negligible for Skylake with later patches.
There have been rumors in the past that Intel will skip to 7nm for high end desktops. I hope it is true.
7nm in large volumes will probably not ship until late 2021 or 2022.
Xeons based on Ice Lake-SP(10nm+) will ship in Q2 2020. HEDT have traditionally been based on the server platforms, and considering HEDT is low volume compared to mainstream, Intel could choose to release HEDT based on 10nm+, but nothing is confirmed so far.
Intel does not need help with performance. Skylake (and all the minor modifications to it) are competitive if not faster than Zen.<snip>
What Intel needs help with is power efficiency that 10nm/7nm does bring to the table. Smaller dies may be helpful or harmful but we do not know that yet for sure.
Skylake have no problem with core speed vs. Zen 2. Zen 2's advantage will be energy efficiency and density allowing for more cores, which is where Intel will be limited by their 14nm node. Intel's 6- and 8-cores will consume more energy than their Zen 2 counterparts, but will have no issues competing in other regards. It's when you go past 8-10 cores that Intel will face problems, which means they will have no direct competitor to 12-/16-core "mainstream" parts.
Even if 10nm was less troubled, they would probably still struggle to achieve higher clock speeds. The long-term expectations is actually lower clock speeds for upcoming nodes, so future progress will depend on IPC gains.
My biggest complaint about Intel's situation is the lack of a proper backup plan. If they had only backported Synny Cove to 14nm, they would have had a good performance gain and lead for the next two years in the mainstream segment.
