Intel announces Sunny Cove CPU architecture for 2019

MANILA, Philippines – Intel on Wednesday, December 12, announced its latest CPU chip architecture which the company called Sunny Cove as part of its Architecture Day event.

Four of the features that come with the Sunny Cove architecture are the following:

• Enhanced microarchitecture to execute more operations in parallel.
• New algorithms to reduce latency.
• Increased size of key buffers and caches to optimize data-centric workloads.
• Architectural extensions for specific use cases and algorithms. For example, new performance-boosting instructions for cryptography, such as vector AES and SHA-NI, and other critical use cases like compression and decompression.

Intel says the architecture ‘is designed to increase performance per clock and power efficiency for general purpose computing tasks.”

An Ars Technica report explained it thus: while chips using the Skylake architecture can perform two loads and one store per cycle, Sunny Cove can perform two loads and two stores. There is also a larger reorder buffer, “enabling more out-of-order instructions in flight, and the load and store buffers are also larger, enabling more in-flight memory operations.”

Intel said the architecture also speeds up “special purpose computing tasks,” such as cryptographic functions and artificial intelligence.

Sunny Cove will be the architecture used for 2019’s lineup of next-generation Intel Xeon (server) and Intel Core (client) processors, the company added. – Rappler.com