Rocket lake, intel to adapt willow cove cores to architecture

Intel is trying to introduce a truly new CPU core design after a gap of nearly five years. However, it appears that the company's 10nm challenges could be significantly limiting its design and deployment options. Intel's new microarchitecture, known internally as 'Willow Cove', could be implemented on a CPU like Rocket Lake with an older node like 14nm, a Tweet from a reliable source indicates.

"Rocket Lake" is essentially a 14nm adaptation of "Tiger Lake"

Intel's 'Sunny Cove' will soon be replaced by the supposedly new 'Willow Cove' CPU core. It goes without saying that this new microarchitecture for next-generation Intel CPUs is supposed to be a great milestone. In fact, the Willow Cove design will be the company's first truly new CPU core design in nearly 5 years. However, Intel has issues with 10nm which has delayed the entire implementation process.

Although the Willow Cove core design succeeds Sunny Cove, it appears that Intel is working to adapt the Willow Cove CPU cores to a 14nm microarchitecture. The Sunny Cove microarchitecture will be implemented in 10 nm “Ice Lake”. And we all expected Willow Cove to debut with the 10nm + Tiger Lake CPUs. But it looks like that might not happen, at least in the near future.

A fairly trustworthy Twitter user @chiakokhua tried to make sense of some highly technical documents. The Twitter user, a retired VLSI engineer with a proven history of CPU microarchitecture news, claims that "Rocket Lake" is essentially a 14nm adaptation of "Tiger Lake." Furthermore, the iGPU in this alleged new generation of CPUs has been significantly reduced. Apparently Intel chose the design to accommodate larger CPU cores. In other words, Intel's inability to switch to 10nm sizes is forcing the company to make some unfavorable design decisions.

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This is why the Gen12 iGPU in "Rocket Lake-S" will have only 32 execution units (UEs). It goes without saying that this is exceptionally lower than on Tiger Lake CPUs. With 96 UEs, Tiger Lake CPUs have three times more graphics power. Incidentally, "Rocket Lake" also replaces the "Tiger Lake" FIVR (Fully Integrated Voltage Regulation) with a conventional VRM SVID architecture. These are sacrifices that Intel must make to move Willow Cove to a 14nm architecture.

Finally, it has been previously reported that “Rocket Lake-S” silicon has up to 8 CPU cores maximum. Even the predecessor of this CPU, the "Comet Lake-S", has up to 10 cores, another of the sacrifices that Intel made for this architecture. We will keep you informed.

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