Intel 10nm Roadmap Leaked: Alder Lake May Land This Year

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This might turn out to be a good year for Intel.

A Weibo user has shared two alleged Intel PowerPoint slides pointing to the chipmaker's 10nm rollout for 2020. As with any leak, however, approach this information with skepticism as it hasn't been confirmed by Intel.

The first slide's title roughly translates to "Moore's Law: Return to a Two-Year Cadence" and details the estimated timeline for Intel's upcoming 10nm and 7nm nodes. This is the same chart that Intel shared at its 2019 investor meeting with some additional annotations that weren't previously present.

For the 10nm portfolio, the slide claims improved yields, significant increase in production capacity and a series of 10nm products launching in 2020. As for the 7nm lineup, the leak says the leading product will land in 2021, while the complete product portfolio can be expected in 2022. The information also suggests performance enhancements every year.

The second slide allegedly contains all the 10nm product launches that we could be see from Intel throughout this year.

Alder Lake is the codename for Intel's upcoming 10nm desktop CPUs that are rumored to adopt the hybrid architecture like Lakefield. Rumors point to a 16-core configuration comprised of eight big cores and eight small cores. For reference, Lakefield utilizes a combination of Sunny Cove and Tremont cores. The current possibilities for Alder Lake include Willow Cove or Golden Cove for the more powerful cores and Tremont or Gracemont for the low-power cores. The exact design is unknown at this point.

Tiger Lake will reportedly replace the existing Ice Lake family. The new 10nm processors look like they'll fuse Intel's Willow Cove cores with its Gen12 Xe graphics engine. Another improvement worth mentioning is that Tiger Lake chips are expected to come with a larger amount of L3 cache, up to 50% more than Ice Lake. Tiger Lake could come out this summer.

Processors won't be the only thing on Intel's menu either. The DG1 discrete graphics card, which is based on the Xe graphics architecture, is seemingly scheduled to arrive this year. A tweet from Raja Koduri, Intel’s chief architect, hinted to a June 2020 release. The DG1 seems to be packing up to 96 Execution Units (EUs). At eight shaders per EU, the DG1 would have up to 768 shaders at its disposal. For context, Tiger Lake's Gen12 iGPU also features 96 EUs; however, the DG1 should be significantly faster.

On the server side, Intel will seemingly refresh its Xeon offerings with 10nm Ice Lake-SP chips. A previous leaked slide showed Ice Lake-SP maxing out at 38 cores and supporting up to 64 PCIe 4.0 lanes and eight memory channels. Of course, Ice Lake-SP will command a new CPU socket, which in this case is LGA4189.

Lastly, the slides also list Snow Ridge, an SoC that Intel designed specifically for 5G base stations. However, Intel already launched Snow Ridge in the first quarter of this year.
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