As the high-tech company looks to expand into the VR and gaming niches, Intel's upcoming Cannonlake chips are expected to deliver a significant performance improvement.
Intel's Upcoming Cannonlake CPUs
According to Hard OCP, Intel's Cannonlake chips will make their debut in the second half of the year. The chip maker promises a significant performance improvement, similar to the jump from Skylake chips to Kaby Lake. It appears that the upcoming flagship Cannonlake processor is kind of a big deal for the company.
For Intel, Cannonlake is being the company's first 10-nm chip. Tech experts expect that the processor will impress on the lower power consumption aspects even if the performance increase turns out to be modest. However, thanks in large part to eSports and other elements of gaming, Intel is totally committed to performance improvements.
The company promises a performance improvement of over 15 percent for the upcoming Cannonlake chips compared to its Kaby Lake chips, according to Venkata Renduchintala, president of the Intel Client and Internet of Things businesses and Systems Architecture Group. At the company's annual investor day, on Thursday, Feb. 9, Intel didn't provide exact numbers, but the projection is based on the SysMark benchmark.
It is expected that detailed performance improvement numbers for Cannonlake will emerge soon. In case of the performance improvements from Skylake to Kaby Lake, they topped out at 15 percent. It makes sense that the CPU performance boost for Cannonlake will reach at least that.
First time when Intel showed a Cannonlake chip was at CES. According to PCWorld, the Cannonlake chips are called 8th-generation on an Intel slide. However, they could also include some Core i7 chips. Since the Cannonlake CPU will be the first made on Intel's 10-nanometer process, it is expected to deliver a substantial reduction in power consumption. Intel aims to catch up with AMD. Rival Ryzen chips are boasting a 40 percent performance improvement in instructions per cycle (IPC).
Intel's High-Performance PC Chips
The niche of high-performance PC chips is still a lucrative venture for chipmaker Intel. Last year, the demand for high-performance Core i7 chips skyrocketed, as the gaming market, especially eSports, is exploding. Buyers will be motivated to upgrade their old Core i3 chips to new Core i7 chips, as markets like virtual reality heat up.
According to Renduchintala, the Core i7 chips are up to 36 percent faster than Core i3 chips. In past years, Intel and other chipmakers focused on increasing performance by raising the clock frequency. However, that approach made chips power hungry.
Meanwhile, the focus of chipmakers shifted to adding cores, which boosted both battery life to laptops and performance. Today, the focus turned to integrating new and advanced technologies like I/O buses and graphics inside processors. The focus has shifted back to raw CPU performance, due to virtual reality and gaming requirements.
Since rival chipmaker AMD is coming on strong with Ryzen, Intel will have to find ways to maintain its supremacy on the market. Based on the early hype, tech analysts believe that Ryzen will start off strong in high-end gaming PCs, but then its success will depend on word-of-mouth recommendations. The subsequent success in consumer desktops and laptops will depend on PC makers adopting AMD's chip.
