Examining Intel's Ice Lake Processors: Taking a Bite of the Sunny Cove Microarchitecture
by Dr. Ian Cutress on July 30, 2019 9:30 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- 10nm
- Microarchitecture
- Ice Lake
- Project Athena
- Sunny Cove
- Gen11
Two Versions, Two Different Power Targets
Intel has promised that Ice Lake-U will be seen in a variety of form factors, targeting anywhere from 9W to 28W. This sort of range is not new for a U-series processor – we typically see overlap from something lower down (the Y-series, ~5W) or higher up (H-series, ~45W), however Ice Lake hasn’t currently been listed for H series power budgets - only Y and U. Having such a wide window, from 5-28W, allows Intel to be very wide with binning the chips as they come of the production line, which is a very valid tactic for promoting as much yield as possible with minimal waste.
Technically there will be two different Ice Lake BGA mobile packages – one aimed at low power (7-12W) for the Y series, and another for higher power designs (15-28W) in the U series.
At this point Intel has not stated what core configurations will be in both packages, however it is likely that the lower power 7-12W ‘Type 4’ package will be for Y-series implementations only, especially given that the overall package size is only 490mm2 (26.5x18.5) compared to 1250 mm2 (50x25), making it 39% the size of the larger high power package. It stands to reason then that the smaller package is for lower performance and low power options, despite being exactly the same silicon.
This Type-4 option also uses the ‘recessed in board’ design we first saw with Broadwell-Y, which is required based on the integrated voltage regulators that Intel now uses on its low powered designs. This makes a very interesting point about Intel’s capabilities with low powered 10nm designs: one could postulate that as the recessed model is well above the traditional Y-series power line. If the 10nm process doesn’t go low down enough in power to that sub-5W range, it could either be because of power, or there isn't enough frequency for Intel to actually sell at volume. Alternatively Intel could end up increasing the base power of the Y-series. One could draw parallels with the first generation 10nm Cannon Lake Core i3-8121U at 15W, which was initially postulated to be dual-core Y-series silicon, rather than the 15W U-series designation it ended up with (our review showed that it did indeed consume more power for the same work compared to a 14nm equivalent design, which would imply a very high static power). With this in mind, it makes me wonder what percentage of Type 3 / Type 4 package designs Intel will end up shipping into the market.
Broadwell Motherboard Design for Recessed Power Implementation
Intel is keen to promote that one of the new features of Ice Lake is its Thin Magnetic Inductor Array, which helps the FIVR achieve better power conversion efficiencies and waste less power. The main issue with a FIVR is at low power consumption states that have a lot of inefficiency – some other processor designs have a linear LDO (Low-Dropout Regulator) implementation which is better for low power designs but less efficient in high power modes.
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name99 - Wednesday, July 31, 2019 - link
That’s an idiotic chain of reasoning.ARM Macs will ship with macOS, not iOS. To believe otherwise only reveals that you know absolutely nothing of how Apple thinks.
As for comparison, the rough number is A12X gets ~5200 on GB4, Intel best (non-OC’d) gets ~5800. That’s collapsing lots of numbers down to one, but comparing benchmark by benchmark you see Apple does very well (almost matching Intel) across an awful lot.
If Apple can maintain its past pace (and there is no reason why not...) we can expect A13X to be anywhere from 20% to 35% faster, which puts it well into “fastest [non-OC’d] CPU on earth” territory for most single-threaded use cases. Can they achieve this? Absolutely.
Just process improvement can get them 10% frequency. I expect A13X to clock around 2.8GHz.
Then there is LPDDR5 which I expect they will be using, so substantially improved memory bandwidth. Then I expect they'll have SVE (2x256) and accompanying that basically double the bandwidth all the way out from L1 to DRAM.
These are just the obvious basics. There are a bunch of things they can still do that represent “fairly easy” improvements to get to that 25% or so. (These include more aggressive fusion, a double-pumped ALU, attached ALUs to load/store to allow load-ok and op-store fusion, a micro-op cache, long-term-parking, criticality prediction, ...)
So, if it’s so easy, why doesn’t Intel also do it? Why indeed? That’s why I occasionally post my alternative rant about how INTC is no longer an engineering company, it is now pretty much purely a finance company...
ifThenError - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
Sorry, but both these comments seem mighty uninformed. The MacBooks Air and Pro currently and in the foreseeable future all run on Intel CPUs. The Apple Chips A12/13 are used in iPhone, iPad and the likes.And regarding your prediction, your enthusiasm seems way over the top. What are you even talking about? Micro-op cache on a RISC processor? Think again. Aren't RISC commands all micro ops already?
name99 - Sunday, August 4, 2019 - link
Strong the Dunning-Kruger is with this one...Dude, seriously, learn something about MODERN CPU design, more than just buzz-words from the 80s.
To get you started, how about you read
https://www.anandtech.com/show/14384/arm-announces...
and concentrate on understanding EVERY aspect of what's being added to the CPU and why.
Note in particular that 1.5K Mop cache...
More questions to ask yourself:
- Why was 80s RISC obsessed with REDUCED instructions?
- Why was ARM (especially ARMv8) NOT obsessed with that? Look at the difference between ARMv8 and, say, RISC-V.
- Why is op-fusion so important a part of modern high performance CPUs (both x86 and ARM [and presumably RISC-V if they EVER ship a high-performance part, ha...])?
- which are the fast (shallow logic, even if it's wide) and which are the slow (deep logic) parts of a MODERN pipeline?
ifThenError - Monday, August 5, 2019 - link
Oh my, this is so entertaining you should charge for the reading.You demand to go beyond just buzz words (what would be good) while your posts look like entries to a contest on how many marketing phrases can be fit into a paragraph.
Then you even manage to combine this with highly rude idiom. Plus you name a psychological effect but fail to transfer it to self-reflexion. And as cherry on the top you obviously claim for yourself to understand „EVERY aspect“ of a CPU (an unimaginably complex bit of engineering) but even manage to confuse micro- and macro-op cache and the conceptual differences of these.
I'm really impressed by your courage. Publicly posting so boldly on such a thin basis is brave.
Your comments add near zero information but are definately worth the read. Pure comedy gold!
Please see this as an invitation to reply. I'm looking forwards to some more of your attempts to insult.
Techgeek43 - Tuesday, July 30, 2019 - link
Fantastic article Ian, I for one, cannot wait for ice lake laptopsWonderful in-depth analysis, with an interesting insight into the Intel brand
repoman27 - Tuesday, July 30, 2019 - link
"The high-end design with 64 execution units will be called Iris Plus, but there will be a ‘UHD’ version for mid-range and low-end parts, however Intel has not stated how many execution units these parts will have."Ah, but they have: Ice Lake-U Iris Plus (48EU, 64EU) 15 W, Ice Lake-U UHD (32EU) 15 W. So their performance comparisons may even be to the 15 W Iris Plus with 64 EUs, rather than the full fat 28 W version.
I know you have access to the media slide decks, but Intel has also posted product briefs for the general public that contain a lot of this info: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/d...
"On display pipes, Gen11 has access to three 4K pipes split between DP1.4 HBR3 and HDMI 2.0b. There is also support for 2x 5K60 or 1x 4K120 with a 10-bit color depth."
The three display pipes are not limited to 4K, and are agnostic of transport protocol—each of them can be output via the eDP 1.4b port, one of the 3 DDI interfaces which can support either DisplayPort 1.4 or HDMI 2.0b, or one of the up to 4 Thunderbolt 3 ports. Both HDMI and DP support HDCP 2.2, and DisplayPort also supports DSC 1.1. The maximum single pipe, single port resolution for HDMI is 4K60 10bpc (4:2:2), and for DisplayPort it's 4K120/5K60 10bpc (with DSC).
Thunderbolt 3 integration for Ice Lake-Y is only up to 3 ports.
abufrejoval - Tuesday, July 30, 2019 - link
What I personally liked most about the GT3e (48 EU) and GT4e (72 EU) Skylake variant SoCs was, that they didn't cost the extra money they should have, especially when you consider that the iGPU part completely dwarfs the CPU cores (which Intel makes you bleed for) and is much better than everything else combined together (have a look at the WikiChips layoutshttps://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/microarchitectu...
Of course, a significantly better graphics performance is never a bad thing, especially when it also doesn't cost extra electrical power: The bigger iGPUs might have actually been more energy efficient than their GT2 brethren at a graphics load that pushed the GT2 towards its frequency limits. And in any case if you don't crunch it on graphics, the idle consumption is near perfect: One of the reasons most laptop dGPU designs won't even bother to run 2D on the dGPU any more but leave that to Intel.
The biggest downside was that you couldn't buy them outside an Apple laptop or Intel NUC.
But however much Intel goes into Apple mode (the major customer for these beefier iGPUs) in terms of "x time faster than previous", the result aren't going to turn ultrabooks with this configuration into "THD gaming machines".
To have a good feel as to where these could go and whether they are worth the wait, just have a look at the Skull Canyon nuc6i7kyk review on this site: That SoC uses 72 EUs and 128MB of eDRAM and should put a pretty firm upper limit to what a 64 EU Ice Lake can do: Most of the games in that review are somewhat dated yet fail to reach 20FPS at THD.
So if you want to game on the device, you'd be much better of with a dGPU however small and chose the smallest iGPU variant available. No reason to wait, Whisky + Nvidia will do better.
If you want real gaming performance, you need to put real triple digit Watts and the bandwidth only GDDR5/6 or HBM can deliver to work even at THD, but with remote gaming perhaps it doesn't have to be on your elegant slim ultrabook. There again anything but the GT2 configuration is wasted, because only need the VPU part for decoding Google Stadia (or Steam Remote) streams, which is the same for all configurations.
For some strange reason, Intel has been selling GT3/4 NUCs at little or no premium over GT2 variants and in that case I have been seriously tempted. And only once I even managed to find a GT3e laptop once for a GT2 price (while the SoC is literally twice as big and the die carrier even adds eDRAM at zero markup), which I stil cherish.
But if prices are anywhere related to the surface area of the chip (as they are for the server parts), these high powered GTs are something that only Apple users would buy.
That's another reaons, I (sadly) don't expect them to be sold in anything bug Macs and some NUCs, no ChuWi notebooks or Mini-ITX boards.
abufrejoval - Tuesday, July 30, 2019 - link
...(need edit)Judging from the first 10nm generation, GPUs where the part where obtaining economically feasible yields didn't work out. Unless they have really, really fixed 10nm it's not hard to imagine that Intel could be selling high-count EU SoCs to Apple below cost, to keep them for another generation as flagship customer and perhaps due to long-term contractual obligations.
But maintaining GT2/3/4 price egality for the rest of the market seems suicidal even if you have a fab lead.
Not that I expect we'll ever be told: In near monopoly situations the so called market ecnomy becomes surprisingly complex.
willis936 - Wednesday, July 31, 2019 - link
What the hell is a THD in this context?jospoortvliet - Monday, August 5, 2019 - link
Probably full HD (True HD)?