Re:Intel Readies Skylake Micro-Architecture
2011/07/27 00:39:45
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Some of you guys are blowing this out of porportion I'm afraid. About the only new information are the codenames of the next micro architecture beyond Haswell and the shrink lithography of Rockwell.
All of you try something, open up your device manager, open processors and right-click any one of the threads. Hit up the driver tab and what do you see for "Driver Date"? My Core i5 480M says June 21, 2006; my Core i7 920 had a driver date from 2004; what's the significance? It takes a couple years to make a processor from the ground up. It just shouldn't be a surprise that Intel (or AMD, or any other processor manufacturer) is already working on future generations right now that won't appear in retail for several years. Even AMD and nVidia work on their graphics year ahead of time, nVidia was designing the 8-series back when FX 5-series were debuting -- that doesn't mean they had access to DX10 back then, I'm talking about the die design and architecture.
I doubt AMD and Intel have access to the non-existent or not-yet-ratified DX12/PCIe 4.0 for those future processors, again the CPU and GPU are separate constructs from the standards they follow.
So now we know what comes for Intel:
32nm Sandy Bridge
22nm Ivy Bridge
** probable socket set change **
22nm Haswell
14nm Rockwell
** probable socket set change **
14nm Skylake
10nm Skymont
AMD seems to have two co-existing and similar micro-architectures per lithography while Intel lumps them into the same microarchitecture. Maybe seronx can inform me, how similar are Bobcat and Bulldozer in their simplistic forms? The core and cache systems of Sandy Bridge are identical from laptop, desktop, to server; for the most part. That laptop and desktop have an integrate GPU where high-end desktop and server do not yet have additional DDR3 channels and PCIe lanes...it just seems like they are consolidating their codenames when they shouldn't.