The design of the Willow Cove processor core is based on Sunny Cove, which is Intel's first core with a truly new architecture in the last 5 years. However, Sunny Cove is only implemented in the 10nm Ice Lake processors, while the Willow Cove cores are expected to appear in the Tiger Lake CPUs (10nm+ process). The mass production of Intel's 10nm chips has been delayed until the end of 2020, so enthusiasts of Intel solutions might have to stick with the relatively older architecture for another year.
However, it seems that Intel is working on adapting the Willow Cove cores to its modern 14nm standards, and this implementation may already be seen in the Rocket Lake processors. At least, this is what a Twitter user by the handle @chiakokhua, a retired VLSI (very large scale integration) engineer, has reported, sharing various news related to CPU architecture on his account.
Hereās the proper translation:
Ā«Apologies, made mistakes copying the spec. RKL-UP3/S should be AVX-512.Ā»
Ā«In plain language: RKL = 14nm version of TGL, minus iTBT, with weakened IGDĀ»
Ā«Plus changed VRM scheme to SVID.Ā»
ā RetiredEngineerĀ® (@chiakokhua)
He noted that the technical documents for Rocket Lake essentially describe it as a 14nm adaptation of Tiger Lake, but the integrated graphics receive much less transistor budget; engineers had to make this trade-off to free up space for larger processor cores. Additionally, the FIVR (fully integrated voltage regulator) from Tiger Lake will be replaced in this processor with a traditional SVID VRM power management system.
From earlier reports, it is known that the 14nm Rocket Lake-S chip will include up to 8 processor cores, although its predecessor, Comet Lake-S, featured up to 10 cores. It is now clear that the reduced number of cores will likely be partially compensated for by gains in instructions executed per cycle (IPC). This could mark the first significant increase in the IPC metric since the Skylake processors.
Source: 3dnews.ru
