Intel Innovation 2023: the biggest announcements – The Verge
Intel has wrapped up its annual Innovation event in San Jose, where the chipmaker gave us a glimpse of what’s coming down the pipeline over the next few years. In case you don’t have a spare hour and a half to sit down and watch CEO Pat Gelsinger’s keynote, here are some important things we learned.
For those unfamiliar, 3D V-Cache allows AMD to stack additional cache (high-speed, short-term memory) directly onto its CPU. The results we saw from the ROG Strix Scar X3D (the monstrous RTX 4090 gaming laptop where 3D V-Cache made its mobile debut) were great for AMD and worrisome for Intel. It’s an unbelievably powerful device that blows Intel’s 4090 offerings out of the water.
Intel also confirmed that Lunar Lake is on track to release in 2024. Like its predecessor, the Meteor Lake sequel will use Intel’s Foveros design. It’s also supposed to mark the commercial debut of Intel’s 1.8nm manufacturing process, known as Intel 18A. (In human terms: Its transistors will be really, really, really freakin’ small.)
Gelsinger showed off Pike Creek, which is the world’s first working UCIe-enabled chiplet-based processor. UCIe stands for “Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express”, and it’s essentially a plug-and-play standard that can allow different silicon modules to work together in one chiplet package. One chipmaker could grab another company’s chiplet and snap it into their design. In theory, this would allow chipmakers to better specialize in certain types of chiplets and bring their products to market more quickly.
Intel will use the UCIe interface post-Arrow Lake, and it’s the first company to show functional silicon. (Intel donated the first version of the UCIe spec to the standards body that’s developing it.)
Intel currently uses an organic resin as the foundation of its chips. The company announced that it’s begun transitioning to new technology that will let chips sit on a bed of glass. This should give Intel more room to pack additional transistors, as well as (Intel expects) better data transfer, less warping, and less mechanical breakage under heat.
Gelsinger announced the upcoming Sierra Forest Xeon processor, which has 288 E-cores. You know, just in case you’re finding that however many cores you have right now is insufficient for your backyard data center.
He did not actually say this himself, but his colleague Craig suggested that it might be the case, and Gelsinger kind of nodded in a sheepish way, which is all the proof I need. What do we all think his favorite album is? I get Reputation vibes.