Intel just gave everyone a taste of what's to come. Meet the new Sunny Cove processors of 2019, featuring a new microarchitecture that should effectively replace the Skylake processors behind servers, laptops, desktops, and perhaps even future MacBooks.
Intel is parsing information thinly for now, and as such, there's very little information about these processors at the moment. However, Intel assures that there will be a Sunny Cove product in the marketplace soon. In fact, it might ship as early as next year.
Intel Sunny Cove Processors
There are two main types of improvements Intel considers when designing a new core, according to Ronak Singhal, Intel Fellow and director for CPU computing architecture. The first, of course, is "out of the box performance," which literally means gains users get simply by replacing the CPU with a new one.
The second kind, and also more critical to the development of Sunny Cove, is what Singhal calls "targeted algorithms" for the instruction set of the cores. This is the facilitator between the CPU's hardware and the software on the storage drive. Intel aimed to improve the instruction set in three contexts: cryptography, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. This essentially means developers could see major improvements writing, testing, and running their programs on Sunny Cove chips as opposed to platforms with Skylake or AMD processors.
Intel describes the chips as being "deeper, wider, and smarter," and in addition to performance gains, they'll also use less power than their predecessors.
The chips come after a number of delays in what could be called as one of the roughest years for Intel so far. For the company, 2018 was marked by major departures and security disasters, among other things. Intel had also originally scheduled 10-nanometer mass production as early as 2015, but that never came to pass. Now, however, the company is finally promising 10nm processors in consumers' hands by mid-2019.
Sunny Cove MacBooks?
Since Intel is keeping mum about the entire thing, it's not clear which laptops are going to be equipped with Sunny Cove chips. However, it's likely Apple will use them to power future MacBooks. If not from Intel, Apple is still expected to use the 10-nanometer process anyway.
Intel is certainly trying to maintain a good relationship with Apple in any case. In fact, the company reiterated plans to manufacture discrete graphics cards by 2020, presumably in an effort to retain Apple as a customer through the next decade.
