Upgrade the three-generation architecture Intel processor IPC triple jump in 2 years

CPU performance is far from excessive: frequency and IPC are two-pronged

As the performance basis of PC computers, CPU almost affects the performance of all applications. Nowadays, there are more and more scenes that require PCs. Even if it is office Internet access, everyone has to open a lot of web pages, hanging WeChat, QQ, editing Word, Excel, or PPT, if it is playing games, then add light pursuit special effects and live broadcast. , Audio and video chat, the general CPU has long been unable to support.

If it is productivity applications such as content creation, such as PS, video editing, animation rendering, etc., the CPU performance requirements are even higher.

Therefore, the theory of excess CPU performance can be stopped. Now everyone hopes that the CPU will continue to improve performance. This has to be viewed from two aspects-everyone knows that CPU performance = IPCx frequency, so we must start from both frequency and IPC.

In terms of CPU frequency, Intel has made a lot of progress in the past two years. The latest 10th and 11th generation Core processors have pushed the frequency to 5.3GHz, but the bad news is that the CPU frequency is getting more and more difficult, and it will also bring power consumption. The negative impact of increased fever is expected to linger around 5GHz for a period of time.

The CPU frequency cannot be increased significantly, and it depends on the IPC performance. It refers to Instruction per Clock (the number of instructions per cycle)-the more instruction calculations completed at the same time, the stronger the IPC and the CPU performance. Higher.

The relationship between frequency and IPC is like a car pulling cargo-a fast car is equivalent to a high frequency, and it can run a few more times per unit time, and IPC is equivalent to the cargo pulling capacity, and some small cars can only carry one or two tons of cargo. Changing to a larger car (strong IPC) can pull up three to five tons at a time, and the overall performance of the CPU is thus improved.

The best way to solve CPU performance, frequency, and IPC is a two-pronged approach, and IPC is closely related to the CPU architecture. The improvement of IPC depends on the upgrade of the new architecture.

In order to improve CPU performance, Intel has launched general upgrades in the past two years. In addition to increasing the CPU frequency to 5.3GHz, IPC has also achieved leapfrogging by upgrading the three-generation architecture in two years. There will be 12-generation Core Alder in the second half of this year. With the advent of Lake, performance has taken a step up.

Intel’s core architecture Skylake, which has been used for many years, began to give up in the 10th generation of Core. Intel has introduced a new generation of CPU roadmap. The core series are mainly Sunny Cove, Willow Cove, and Golden Cove. The upgrade focus of each generation of core architecture is different.

The new architecture starts with Sunny Cove, which is also a CPU architecture optimized for the 10nm process. It was first released on the IceLake 10th generation Core processor. Its main design goal is to improve the performance and energy efficiency of a large number of applications by improving the architecture. It is available in almost all applications. Obvious performance improvement, the focus is on ST single-threaded performance.

In order to improve IPC performance, the internal design of Sunny Cove core is very different from Skylake. The configuration of each part is "wider, deeper, and more". For example, the L1 data cache is increased by 50%, the L2 cache is doubled, and the execution port is changed from 8. Increased to 10 and so on.

In terms of general performance, Sunny Cove can reduce latency, increase throughput, improve parallel computing capabilities, and improve the experience of games, multimedia, data, and other related applications.

In addition, Sunny Cove has also strengthened for special applications, involving artificial intelligence/machine learning, encryption and decryption, compression/decompression, communication/network, general SIMD (single instruction multiple data stream)/vector processing, special SIMD/vector Processing, multi-threading, and multi-agent processing, etc.

One of the representatives is the performance of AES encryption and decryption. On the 10-generation Core processor of Sunny Cove architecture, the performance of 7-Zip can be increased by 75%, and the effect is very obvious.

The 10nm Sunny Cove architecture is the biggest improvement in Intel architecture in recent years, so its performance improvement is very obvious. Under the same 15W power consumption, the ST single-thread performance of the IceLake processor has increased by more than 30-40% compared to Skylake.

Considering a large number of applications, the IPC performance of Sunny Cove architecture has increased by about 10% at least, and at most increased by 40%, with an average increase of 18%. This is the most obvious improvement of Intel Core processors in the past 10 years.

After the IceLake processor, Intel has upgraded the Willow Cove microarchitecture on the 11th-generation Core, code-named Tiger Lake processor, and the process has also been upgraded to 10nm SuperFin. The optimized version of the 10nm process has improved energy efficiency and increased the CPU frequency by 20%. The processor can easily reach 4.8 GHz.

In terms of IPC performance, the Willow Cove architecture continues to improve on Sunny Cove, focusing on the cache system. The L2 cache has been increased from 512KB to 1.25MB, and the L3 cache has been increased from 8MB to 12MB. At the same time, some new instruction sets, such as CET and AMX, AVX512 vector instructions, and so on.

It is worth mentioning that the previous Sunny Cove and Willow Cove cores were all first released on mobile processors. In March this year, Intel launched the 11th-generation Core desktop version of the Rocket Lake-S series. It uses the Cypress Cove architecture. The kernel is not on the roadmap, it should be based on Suuny Cove or Willow Cove and ported to the desktop processor.

The IPC of Cypress Cove architecture has increased by 19%, which is slightly higher than Sunny Cove's 18%.

In Intel's CPU roadmap, the most anticipated is Golden Cove, which will be used in the second half of the 12th-generation Core Alder Lake processor. It has not been released yet, so the specific information is lacking.

But from the previous news, the Golden Cove architecture is another key improvement. It will once again improve ST single-thread performance and AI performance, improve network and 5G performance, and enhance security at the same time.

Golden Cove will also use the large and small core architecture, matched with the high-performance core Gracemont, the desktop version can easily achieve 16 cores and 24 threads-the large core Golden Cove supports HT hyperthreading, and the small core does not support 24 threads.

In other respects, Golden Cove's IO system will also be fully upgraded to support DDR5 memory, with a frequency of up to DDR5-6400, and PCIe 5.0 debut, which will also improve the performance of Golden Cove.

On the whole, compared to Sunny Cove architecture, which has improved IPC performance by 18%, Golden Cove is expected to improve more, and 50% IPC performance improvement can be expected.

In general, from 2019 to 2021, Intel has accelerated the upgrade of processors. It will launch a three-generation architecture in two years. IPC performance has also risen like a rocket. The Golden Cove in the second half of this year is very worth looking forward to.