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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vFunct - Tuesday, July 30, 2019 - link
Why did they not go with HDMI 2.1 and PCIe 4.0?bug77 - Tuesday, July 30, 2019 - link
AMD'd newly released 5700(XT) doesn't support HDMI 2.1, it's not surprising Intel doesn't support it either.And PCIe 4.0 would be power hog.
ToTTenTranz - Wednesday, July 31, 2019 - link
The 5700 cards don't support VirtuaLink either, despite AMD belonging to the consortium since the beginning like nvidia and the RTX cards having it for about a year.First generation Navi cards are just very, very late.
tipoo - Tuesday, July 30, 2019 - link
PCI-E 4 currently needs chipset fans on desktop parts, the power needed isn't suitable for 15-28W mobile yet.DanNeely - Tuesday, July 30, 2019 - link
Because Intel product releases have been a mess since the 10nm trainwreck began. Icelake was originally supposed to be out a few years ago. I suspect PCIe4 is stuck on whatever upcoming design was supposed to be the 7nm launch part.HDMI 2.1 is probably even farther down the pipeline; NVidia and AMD don't have 2.1 support on their discrete GPUs yet. Intel has historically been a lagging supporter of new standards on their IGPs, so that's probably a few years out.
nathanddrews - Tuesday, July 30, 2019 - link
This whole argument that "real world" benchmarks equate to "most used" is rather dumb anyway. We don't need benchmarks to tell us how much faster Chrome opens Reddit, because the answer is always the same: fast enough to not matter. We need benchmarks at the fringes for those reasons brought up in the room: measuring extremes in single/multi threaded scenarios, power usage, memory speeds; finding weaknesses in hardware and finding flaws in software; and taking a large enough sample to be meaningful across the board.Intel wants to eat its cake and still have it - to be fair - who doesn't? But let's get real, AMD is kicking some major butt right now and Intel has to spin it any way they can. What's funny is that the BEST arguments that I've heard from reviewers to go AMD actually has nothing to do with performance, but rather the Zen platform as a whole in terms of features, upgradeability, and cost.
I say this as a total Intel shill, too. The only AMD systems running in my house right now are game consoles. All my PCs/laptops are Intel.
twotwotwo - Tuesday, July 30, 2019 - link
Interesting to read what Intel suggested some of their arguments in the server space would be: lower TCO like the old Microsoft argument against Linux, and having to revalidate all your stuff to use an AMD platform. Some quotes (from a story in their internal newsletter; the full thing is floating around out there, but couldn't immediately find):https://www.techspot.com/news/80683-intel-internal...
I mean, they'll be fine long term, but trying to change the topic from straightforward bang-for-buck, benchmark results, etc. is an approach you only take in a...certain sort of situation.
eek2121 - Wednesday, July 31, 2019 - link
Unfortunately, your average IT infrastructure guy no longer knows how fast a Xeon Platinum 8168 is vs an AMD EPYC 7601. They just ask OEMs like Dell or HP to sell them a solution. I've even seen cases where faster solutions were replaced with slower solutions because they were more expensive and the numbers looked bigger. It turns out that the numbers that looked bigger were not the numbers that they should have been paying attention to.One company I worked at almost bought a $100,000 (yeah I know, small change, but it was a small company) pre-built system. We, as software developers, talked them into letting us handle it instead. We knew a lot about hardware and as a result? We spent around $15,000 in hardware costs. Yes there were labor costs involved in setting everything up, but it only took about 2 weeks for 4 guys, 2 of which were juniors. Had we gone with the blade system, there would have been extensive training needed, which would have costed about the same in labor. Our solution was fully redundant, a hell of a lot faster (the blade system used hardware that was slower than our solution, and it was also a proprietary system that we would be locked into, so there was an additional service contract that costed $$$ and would have to be signed). During my entire time there, we had very few issues with the solution we built outside the occasional hard drive (2 drives in 4 years IIRC) dying and having to pop it out, pop in a new one, and let the RAID rebuild. Zero downtime. In addition, our wifi solution allowed roaming all over a giant building without dropping the signal. Speeds were lightning fast and QoS allowed us to keep someone from taking up too much bandwidth on the guest network. The entire setup worked like a dream.
We also wanted to use a different setup for the phone system, but they opted to work with a vendor instead. They paid a lot of money for that, and constantly had issues. The administration software was buggy, sometimes the entire system would go down, even adding a user would take down the entire system until things were updated. IIRC after I left they finally switched to the system we wanted to use and had no issues after that.
wrkingclass_hero - Tuesday, July 30, 2019 - link
Uh, I would not be putting cobalt anywhere near my mouthPeachNCream - Tuesday, July 30, 2019 - link
Real men aren't scared of a few toxic chemicals entering their digestive systems! Clearly you and I are not real men, but we now have a role model to emulate over the course of our soon-to-be-shortened-by-cancer lives.