This Tuesday, Intel held an all-day virtual “Architecture Day” conference and took attendees on a deep dive into the architecture of upcoming products in all categories: CPUs, GPUs (dedicated and integrated), and FPGAs. We learned a lot about what Intel’s been working on and why, with the most concrete details being about the most imminent release—next month’s Tiger Lake laptop processors.

Ditching the ticks, tocks, and plusses

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  “Be faster at everything, without using more power” is a pretty solid goal for a laptop CPU architecture. [credit:
  Intel ]

Even for a conference called “Architecture Day,” Intel took us unusually deep into its manufacturing and packaging processes. The day’s presentations leaned as heavily on improvements in the individual transistors and capacitors on-die as they did on improvements in the processor designs themselves.

Aside from the purely educational angle, Intel’s focus on the lower levels of design appeared to serve two purposes. The lower-level focus made Intel’s 10nm process sound worth the unexpectedly long wait—and it gave Intel a chance to ditch the ponderous “++” suffixes to its process size and dub the whole thing a more human-friendly “SuperFin.”