Intel Sunnycove: up to 75% better performance

At the start of Intel’s 2018 Archicture Day, a picture from a purported Sunnycove demonstration was released on the web, showing that the upcoming architecture could offer significantly higher performance in some scenarios.

This image was originally published by Hothardware.com but appears to have been taken down since.

Sunnycove is the code name for one of Intel’s upcoming architectures. It’s unclear, however, whether it’s an entirely new design or a derivative of the previously known Ice Lake platform. Or something else entirely.

Architecture Day replaces IDF

For many years, Intel held its annual Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. It used to gather thousands of developers, journalists and engineers, but after almost 20 years running. Intel decided to cancel the event last year for reasons unknown at the time.

Now Intel appears to have replaced the event with a brand new 2018 Architecture Day, but now targeting primarily the media and close partners, as opposed to developers.

75% performance increase in Sunnycove

Among other things, new prototypes were displayed and one of these was a new platform by the name Sunnycove. What’s interesting is that it seems to offer major performance improvements are in some scenarios.

Thanks to completely new instructions, the platform delivers up to 75 percent better performance in the file-crunching app 7-Zip. It doesn’t mention specifically what part of the app is improved. 7-zip mainly deals with compression, but also supports the cryptographic standards Vector-AES and SHA-NI.

So acceleration of common cryptographic algorithms is what may have been demonstrated.

The only thing known about this so far is a picture from Hothardware that is no longer available.