Intel unveils its biggest shift in chip architecture in a generation

Chip-maker Intel has unveiled its biggest architectural shifts in a generation for CPUs, GPUs and IPUs to meet the crushing demand for more compute performance.

At its 'Architecture Day 2021', Intel set the stage for new generations of leadership products.

During the event, Intel architects provided details on two new x86 central processing unit architectures -- first performance hybrid architecture and Intel Thread Director; Intel's next-generation data center processors; infrastructure processing unit architectures; and upcoming graphics architectures.

"Today, we unveiled our biggest shifts in Intel architectures in a generation. This includes the first in-depth look at Alder Lake, our first performance hybrid architecture with two new generations of x86 cores and the intelligent Intel Thread Director workload scheduler; Sapphire Rapids, Intel's new standard-setting data center architecture," said Raja Koduri, SVP, General Manager, Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group at Intel.

"These architectural breakthroughs set the stage for our next era of leadership products, starting soon with Alder Lake," he added.

Koduri said that the highly scalable x86 microarchitecture addresses compute requirements across the entire spectrum of customer's needs, from low-power mobile applications to many-core microservices.

"Compared with Skylake, Intel's most prolific CPU microarchitecture, the Efficient-core delivers 40 per cent more single-threaded performance at the same power, or the same performance while consuming less than 40 per cent of the power," he informed.

Looking ahead, the world faces a massive demand for compute - potentially a 1,000x need by 2025.

"We face daunting compute challenges that can only be solved through revolutionary architectures and platforms … Our talented architects and engineers made possible all this technology magic," said Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger.