During a presentation, Asus shared new information about Intel’s future business processors. The Korean publication Brainbox photographed a slide apparently comparing Intel’s past and present processor microarchitectures with the upcoming Cooper Lake and Ice Lake-SP.
At first Cooper Lake-SP (CPL-SP) shall be launched on the market. The 14nm chips are expected to land in the second quarter of 2020. It indicates that Cooper Lake will have up to 48 cores with Thermal Design Power (TDP) capabilities of up to 300W. However, Intel has already confirmed that there will be a 56-core Cooper Lake chip. Cooper Lake processors will support up to four Ultra Path Interconnect (UPI) links and 64 PCIe 3.0 tracks.
Ice Lake-SP (ICL-SP), based on Intel’s latest 10nm process node, is expected to arrive shortly after Cooper Lake-SP. The foil points to the third quarter of 2020 and it appears that Ice Lake SP parts will have a maximum of 38 cores and 270W TDP. They enable up to three UPI connections and provide up to 64 PCIe 4.0 tracks.
Cooper Lake-SP and Ice Lake-SP are located on the Whitley platform. Both support dual-socket configurations, eight memory channels, and DDR4-3200 modules. However, only Ice Lake SP parts are compatible with Intel’s second-generation DC Optane persistent memory.
The new processors are expected to fall into the LGA4189 socket, which is available in two variants. The LGA4189-4 (P4) socket contains the Ice Lake-SP and Cooper Lake-4 parts, while the LGA4189-5 (P5) exclusively contains the Cooper Lake-6 parts.
AMD has already set very high standards with its EPYC Rome processors. It is rumored that the Milan EPYC processors, which are based on Zen 3 microarchitecture and 7nm+ nodes, will also fall next year. However you look at it, Intel has a difficult road ahead.