Yesterday, the chip manufacturing giant unleashed Foveros, its news 3-D packaging technology, which makes it easy to stack logic chips over one another. Intel claims users can see the first products to use Foveros in the second half of next year.
Talking about the stacking logic, Raja Koduri, Intel’s chief architect, said, “You can pack more transistors in a given space. And also you can pack different kinds of transistors; if you want to put a 5G radio right on top of a CPU, solving the stacking problem would be great, because you have all of your functionality but also a small form factor.”
With the Foveros technology, Intel will allow for smaller “chiplets,” which describes fast logic chips sitting atop a base die that handles power, I/O and power delivery. This project will also help Intel overcome one of its biggest challenges, i.e, building full chips at 10nm scale. The Forveros backed product will be a 10 nanometer compute element on a base die, typically used in low-power devices.
Source: Intel
Sunny Cove: Intel’s codename for the new 10nm chips
Sunny Cove will be at the heart of Intel’s next-generation Core and Xeon processors which would be available in the latter half of next year. According to Intel, Sunny Cove will provide users with an improved latency and will allow for more operations to be executed in parallel (thus acting more like a GPU).
On the graphics front, Intel’s also got new Gen11 integrated graphics “designed to break the 1 TFLOPS barrier,” which will be part of these Sunny Cove chips. Intel also promises improved speeds in AI related tasks, cryptography, and machine learning among other new features with the CPUs.
According to a detailed report by Ars Technica, “Sunny Cove makes the first major change to x64 virtual memory support since AMD introduced its x86-64 64-bit extension to x86 in 2003. Bits 0 through 47 are used, with the top 16 bits, 48 through 63, all copies of bit 47. This limits virtual address space to 256TB. These systems can also support a maximum of 256TB of physical memory.”
Starting from the second half of next year, everything from mobile devices to data centers may feature Foveros processors over time. “The company wouldn’t say where, exactly, the first Foveros-equipped chip will end up, but it sounds like it’ll be ideal for incredibly thin and light machines”, Engadget reports.
To know more about this news in detail, visit Intel Newsroom.
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