Could there be a desktop version of Tiger Lake CPUs before Alder Lake in 2022?

[g67575]

I'm assuming Alder Lake will come about 1 year after Rocket Lake launches at the end of March 2021. This is based on some leaked roadmaps showing that the enhanced 10nm server CPUs (Sapphire Rapids) are delayed until next year.

So, could we see Willow Cove cores in 10nm desktop CPUs before Alder Lake arrives next year? If so, like the mobile Willow Cove based CPUs, they could be included in the 11th generation of Core CPUs.

Why would Intel do this? Well, a recent Anandtech review suggests the IPC gains of Rocket Lake CPUs vary significantly, depending on the task - between 7-13% in most situations*.

This is lower than the reported 18% IPC improvements for Sunny Cove cores, vs Skylake (Sunny Cove was the generation before Willow Cove based Tiger Lake mobile CPUs).

*19%-19.5% for floating point calculations (e.g. maths heavy calculations).

 

[KompuKare]

This is lower than the reported 18% IPC improvements for Sunny Cove cores, vs Skylake (Sunny Cove was the generation before Willow Cove based Tiger Lake mobile CPUs)..

But IPC is such a hard thing to measure.
Maybe on 10nm as originally intended, Rocket Lake's core would not have whatever bottleneck it has with latency and memory speed.
Maybe on 10nm it would have had more or faster caches.
Maybe, etc., etc.
Backporting a 10nm design to 14nm was no easy thing but some things like timings, transistor budgets etc. cannot simple be ported back.
It is not just a matter of taking the design and growing it to fit more area. (Nominally 14^2 is 196 while 10^2 is obviously 100 so 10nm should have been almost twice as dense.)

 

[g67575]

Couldn't they adapt the existing 10nm Tiger Lake mobile / NUC designs for desktop PCs? Intel are already planning on releasing 8 Core Tiger Lake (Willow Cove core) CPUs in laptops. Apparently, they can turbo boost up to 5ghz on a single core.

 

[smilingcrow]

Couldn't they adapt the existing 10nm Tiger Lake mobile / NUC designs for desktop PCs? They are already planning on releasing 8 Core Tiger Lake (Willow Cove core) CPUs in laptops. Apparently, they can turbo boost up to 5ghz on a single core.

I am sure they considered this.

Before Core 2 Duo was released I had a desktop board that used the mobile only Core Duo chips.
That was king of the hill for a short while.

 

[g67575]

I wonder if it would be difficult to port Tiger Lake from the mobile socket, to the desktop LGA 1200 socket?

According to this, Tiger Lake CPUs use the BGA1499 socket, link here:
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Core-i7-11375H-Processor-Benchmarks-and-Specs.514507.0.html

 

[smilingcrow]

I wonder if it would be difficult to port Tiger Lake from the mobile socket, to the desktop LGA 1200 socket?

You need to consider the different VRM requirements of a 10nm laptop chip and a 14nm desktop chip.
I think you would need to design a platform from the outset to handle both of those chips and it may well be too compromised to make much sense.
Intel's design principles go against that idea.
Makes more sense to release a separate platform for it.

 

[g67575]

Makes more sense to release a separate platform for it.

Might explain why they haven't announced any plans for Tiger Lake desktop, if they don't think a new platform is worth it.

I suppose it might be possible on a new socket like LGA 1700, but it probably isn't ready yet.

 

[smilingcrow]

Considering their massive problems at 10nm and the fact that they still haven't even released the high end 10nm laptop chips, I suspect it was a non starter.
That's why they focused on Alder Lake instead.