Intel Architecture Day 2020: Everything You Need to Know

Due to the overwhelming amount of information and incredibly short amount of time to parse it, we broke our coverage into a series of articles, with more to come. This article serves as the hub for our coverage, and our articles are linked and listed with a brief synopsis of each relevant announcement below: 

Intel's Tiger Lake Roars to Life: Willow Cove Cores, Xe Graphics, Support for LPDDR5: The Tiger Lake processors that come with Willow Cove cores and a high-powered Xe LP Graphics engine. 

Intel Xe HPG Gaming GPU: Taking on AMD and Nvidia: Intel's first discrete graphics card for the enthusiast desktop PC market will arrive in 2021. Intel revealed that it won't make these chips, instead contracting them out to an outside fab. 

Intel Dishes on Alder Lake-S: First x86 Hybrid CPU for Desktops: these new chips are akin to ARM's big.LITTLE concept of clusters of big, fast cores working in tandem with smaller, more efficient cores. Alder Lake-S marks the beginning of the x86 hybrid era for the desktop PC, and Intel's Client 2.0 initiative, which we also cover in this article, signals that the company sees this type of architecture as a long-term path forward. 

Intel displayed its Xe HP and Xe HPC GPUs: Packing a Whopping 40+ TFLOPS: Intel Xe HP is the cornerstone of the company's data center GPU ambitions, with up to 41 TFLOPS of compute for the 4-tile variant.

If there's one thing Intel needs now, it's a coherent message about its plans for the future.

The fallout from Intel CEO Bob Swan's revelation sent the company's valuations into a tailspin as it shed billions of dollars in market cap in a matter of hours, partially fueled by a sense that Intel didn't have specific answers to the pointed questions being thrown its direction. Shortly thereafter, a seemingly-hasty reorganization split its primary design group into five entities as Murthy Renduchintala, the company's chief engineering officer, headed for what appears to be an unplanned departure. 

After hours of video briefings, filtering through hundreds of slides and other materials, and asking plenty of questions, it's pretty easy to boil down the overriding message from Intel at its Architecture Day 2020:

Intel has a plan. 

That previous event was helmed by the dynamic duo brought in by Murthy Renduchintala to help solve the chipmaker's problems: Raja Koduri and Jim Keller. 

Paul Alcorn
Editor-in-Chief

Paul Alcorn is the Editor-in-Chief for Tom's Hardware US. He also writes news and reviews on CPUs, storage, and enterprise hardware.

  • Giroro
    Intel has made it pretty clear that none of their 'plans' really mean that much right now, since they are consistently missing milestones.

    So the real question is, how many years until they actually manage to bring any of this to market?
    Reply
  • vinay2070
    Giroro said:
    Intel has made it pretty clear that none of their 'plans' really mean that much right now, since they are consistently missing milestones.

    So the real question is, how many years until they actually manage to bring any of this to market?
    All thier delays are due to fab issues. I believe that the Xe HPG should come out on time as they have reserved enough capacity on the 6/7nm TSMC. They have also reserved wafers on 5nm god knows what that is for. But I doubt TSMC will ever have space for all of intel CPUs unless Intel asks TSMC to build a bigger foundry for their next node.
    Reply