Intel showed “Sunnycove” with great mystery. The “2018 Architecture Day” event is an opportunity for Intel to encourage investors and their partners. The giant unveils some information on its processor roadmap. They concern the course and the medium term.
It is planned to carry out some demonstrations by presenting the first prototypes of future architectures. One of the booths shows an unknown platform running a processor codenamed “Sunnycove”.
At the moment, the lack of information does not allow us to know exactly where this architecture comes from. Is it something completely new since the introduction of “Nehalem” or is it an optimization of the existing system?
“Sunnycove”, Intel aims at professionals?
According to Intel, this architecture offers significant performance enhancements. Intel figures indicate up to 75% more performance in 7-Zip format, without specifying whether it’s compression, decompression or encryption. Speaking of the latter, this chip has some important encryption features, including support for new sets of encryption instructions such as SHA-NI (Secure Hash Algorithm Instructions) and vector AES. Much of the chip is designed to accelerate encryption, and its applications could be business-oriented. Therefore, it is quite possible for Intel to address the enterprise sector here.
We will have to wait and see whether Intel finally prepares a completely new architecture or is the current one with some improvements to optimize encryption tasks. The core architecture has been with us since 2008, so it’s time to take on up to 16 cores in AM4 with a whole new design and the threat of AMD Zen 2 processors.