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
Using Power More Efficiently: Dynamic Tuning 2.0
A common thread in modern microprocessor design is being able to use the power budget available. There have been many articles devoted to how to define power budgets, thermal budgets, and what the mysterious ‘TDP’ (thermal design power) actually means in relation to power consumption. Intel broadly uses TDP and power consumption simultaneously, along with a few other values, such as power limits 1 and 2 (PL1 and PL2), which apply to sustained power draw and peak power draw respectively. Most Intel processors up until this point will allow a processor to turbo, up to a peak power draw of PL2 for a fixed time, before enforcing a PL1 sustained power draw. This is all very OEM dependent as well. However, for Ice Lake, this changes a bit.
For Ice Lake, Intel has a new feature called Dynamic Tuning 2.0, which implements a layer of machine learning on top of the standard turbo mode. The idea behind DT2.0 is that the processor can predict the type of workload that is incoming, say transcode, and adjust the power budget intelligently to give a longer turbo experience.
Technically the concepts of PL1 and PL2 don’t magically disappear under this new regime – the processor ends up going below max turbo because the algorithm predicts that the user won’t need it, and this saves up ‘power budget’ in order to enable the turbo to work for longer.
This is a topic that Intel will hopefully go into more detail. We do know that it requires collaboration at the OS level, but how these algorithms are trained would be a useful trove of information. It is unclear whether Intel will allow this feature to be enabled/disabled at the user level, for testing purposes, but it should be noted that unless it is by default ‘on’ for OEM systems, we might end up with some systems enabling it while others do not.
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The_Assimilator - Wednesday, July 31, 2019 - link
Getting Thunderbolt on-die is huge for adoption. While I doubt many laptop manufacturers will enable more than a single TB port, desktop is an entirely different kettle of fish.umano - Wednesday, July 31, 2019 - link
I am afraid but I cannot consider 4 cores cpu as premiumKhenglish - Wednesday, July 31, 2019 - link
This honestly is looking like the worst architecture refresh since Prescott. IPC increases are getting almost completely washed out by loss in frequency. I wonder if this would have happened if Ice Lake came out on 14nm. Is the clock loss from uArch changes, process change, or a mix of both?Performance of an individual transistor has been decreasing since 45nm, but overall circuit performance kept improving due to interconnect capacitance decreasing at a faster rate at every node change. It looks like at Intel 10nm, and TSMC 7nm that this is no longer true, with transistor performance dropping off a cliff faster than interconnect capacitance reduction. 5nm and 3nm should be possible, but will anyone want to use them?
Sivar - Wednesday, July 31, 2019 - link
"...with a turbo frequency up to 4.1 GHz"This is the highest number I have come across for the new 10th generation processors, and according to SemiAccurate (which is accurate more often than not), this is likely not an error.
If this value is close to desktop CPU limitations, the low clock speed all but erases the 18% IPC advantage -- an estimate likely based on a first-gen Skylake.
Granted, the wattage values are low, so higher-wattage units should run at least a bit faster.
Farfolomew - Wednesday, July 31, 2019 - link
I’m a bit confused by the naming scheme. Ian, you say: “The only way to distinguish between the two is that Ice Lake has a G in the SKU and Comet Lake has a U”But that’s not what’s posted in several places throughout the article. The ICL processors are named Core iX-nnnnGn where CML are Core iX-nnnnnU. Comet lake is using 5 digits and Ice Lake only 4 (1000 vs 10000 series).
Is this a typo or will ICL be 1000-series Core chips?
name99 - Wednesday, July 31, 2019 - link
Regarding AI on the desktop. The place where desktop AI will shine is NLP. NLP has lagged behind vision for a while, but has acquired new potency with The Transformer. It will take time for this to be productized, but we should ultimately see vastly superior translation (text and speech), spelling and grammar correction, decent sentiment analysis while typing, even better search.Of course this requires productization. Google’s agenda is to do this in the cloud. MS’ agenda I have no idea (they still have sub-optimal desktop search). So probably Apple will be first to turn this into mainstream products.
Relevant to this article is that I don’t know the extent to which instructions and micro-architectures optimized for CNNs are still great for The Transformer (and the even newer and rather superior Transformer-XL published just a few months ago). This may all be a long time happening on the desktop if INTC optimized too much purely for vision, and it takes another of their 7 years to turnaround and update direction...
croc - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
It seems that Ice Lake / Sunny Cove will have hardware fixes for Spectre and Meltdown. I would like to see some more information on this, such as how much speed gain, whether the patch is predictive (so as to block ALL such OOE / BP exploits) etc.MDD1963 - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
A month or so ago, we heard a few rumors that the CPUs were ahead ~18% in IPC (I see that number again in this article), but are down ~20+% in clock speed.... ; it would be nice to see at least one or two performance metrics/comparisons on a shipped product. :)isthisavailable - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Unlike Ryzen mobile, intel’s “upto” 64 EUs part will probably only ship in like 2 laptops. Therefore amd has more designs in my book. I don’t understand people who buy expensive 4K laptops with intel integrated gfx which can’t even render windows 10 ui smoothly.Looking forward to Zen2 + navi based 7nm APU.
Bulat Ziganshin - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
> it can be very effective: a dual core system with AVX-512 outscored a 16-core system running AVX2 (AVX-256).it's obviously wrong - since ice lake has only one avx-512 block but two avx2 blocks, it's not much faster in avx-512 mode compared to avx2 mode
the only mention of HEDT cpus at the page linked is "At a score of 4519, it beats a full 18-core Core i9-7980XE processor running in non-AVX mode". Since AVX-512 can process 16 32-bit numbers in a single operation, no wonder that a single avx-512 core matches 16 scalar cores