Demonstrating Sunny Cove and Gen11 Graphics

As part of the Architecture Event, Intel ran a number of demos on a chip that was supposedly based on the new Sunny Cove cores and Gen11 graphics.

These were development systems with these funky looking heatsinks and loud fans to ensure there was no thermal throttling. One thing worth noticing is that black bit of tape on the heatsink here, which wasn’t present on one of the other demo units.

Hello Ice Lake-U. Being a U-series heatsink, this means that the Core is likely designed for a 15W scenario.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that Intel wasn’t giving anything away in terms of the exact core count on display, speeds, feeds, and power. The demos that were present involved 7-Zip and gaming.

The 7-Zip demo was relatively straight forward, showing how the new instructions such as Vector-AES and SHA-NI in Sunny Cove can give the processor a 75% boost in performance over an equivalent Skylake based platform at iso-frequency. This falls under the ‘specialist’ improvements to the core rather than the general purpose improvements.

The other demo was Tekken 7, being run on a Sunny Cove + Gen11 machine and compared to a Skylake + Gen9 implementation. It looked a good deal smoother that’s for sure, however it was clear that it had some way to go to be fully out of the 30 FPS minimums.

The Next Generation Gen11 Graphics: Playable Games and Adaptive Sync! Going Beyond Gen11: Announcing the XE Discrete Graphics Brand
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  • iwod - Thursday, December 13, 2018 - link

    Except external GPU.
  • Icehawk - Thursday, December 13, 2018 - link

    The number of those sold can be counted on one hand. Ok, maybe two,

    In all my years I've used a FW cable exactly once.

    I've seen a total of two thunderbolt cables, our Mac guy had them for some crap he was doing. IOW, dead just like FW. Proprietary stuff just doesn't tend to last long in an open, commodity, market when equivalents are available for free or pennies on the dollar.
  • dampf - Wednesday, January 2, 2019 - link

    Because nobody knows about it. I'm sure there is a big market for that, just connect a GPU to your laptop via thunderbolt 3 and enjoy high end gaming!
  • johannesburgel - Thursday, December 13, 2018 - link

    Nonsense, it's exactly the other way around. Everything is converging on PCI Express. Every peripheral which can actually profit from USB3 speeds would be better off with a direct PCI Express connection instead, and Thunderbolt can do that. USB3 on the other hand requires protocol conversion on both ends of the cable. Instead of being able to just plug a normal GPU, an off-the-shelf NVMe SSD or any other standard device into an external enclosure, without any hardware or driver adaptions, people have to come up with USB3 interface chips and special USB variants of every device.

    USB3 never had a reason to exist.
  • HStewart - Thursday, December 13, 2018 - link

    I guess you have never truly experience Thunderbolt - it has 40G rate compare USB 3.0 and currently drives a doc - powering multiple monitors plus multiple devices - also remember that it is a superset of USB C Gen 2.

    Not to mention it has external GPU via PCIe.
  • HStewart - Thursday, December 13, 2018 - link

    TB3 is open up - I believe I saw some foreign TB3 controller out there - but there maybe support issue -
  • Gc - Thursday, December 13, 2018 - link

    _e
    X
    looks like it stands for x'ellerator, for many hardware accelerator markets, not just gaming.

    Visually, it looks like a tuxedoed figure skater X holding up Microsoft's 'e'.
  • Samus - Thursday, December 13, 2018 - link

    “a customer asked for a product of about this performance but with a 2 mW standby power state. In order to do this, Intel created and enhanced a number of technologies inside the company. The final product is apparently ideal for the customer, however the chip will also be made available for other OEMs.”

    Clearly Apple.
  • StrainedDig4 - Thursday, December 13, 2018 - link

    Is there a reason when I expand the text screen your video Ads pop up onto the screen, refuse to quit and obscure 1/4 of the display? Are your readers displeasure less important than advertising dollars? I don’t read your articles to buy things, I have Amazon for that, I read to become more informed. Kindly let me know why your pages have become Tomshardware.com lookalikes...
  • ajc9988 - Thursday, December 13, 2018 - link

    advertising dollars keep the lights on and pay the salaries of the authors of these articles. Without ads, you don't get to read the content for pleasure, and then it all is a moot point, now isn't it. With that said, could you give constructive criticism on how they could make it less intrusive while still accomplishing the same goal?

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