Jim Keller: Intel working on significantly bigger CPU architecture

At a talk at the University of California, Berkeley, CPU architect Jim Keller talked about the future of Moore's Law. One of the interesting tidbits he revealed is that Intel is working on significantly bigger CPU architectures that will deliver a much greater increase in IPC than the upcoming Sunny Cove core.

PCGamesN writes Sunny Cove promises a 15-18 percent IPC boost versus the previous generation, with an increase of 38 percent of per-core transistors. The future generations that Keller talks about, which are still a couple of years away, promise to deliver a much closer linear IPC boost relative to the transistor hike.

“[Sunny Cove has an] 800 instruction window, sustains between 3 and 6 x86 instructions per clock,” says Keller, “massive data predictors, massive branch predictors… We’re working on a generation that’s significantly bigger than this and closer to the linear curve on performance. This is a really big mindset change.”

While CEO Lisa Su from Keller's previous employer AMD recently said that she doesn't expect as much benefit from scaling as we go forward, it seems Keller and his team over at Intel think that the sky is still the limit:

“Lots of people think ‘well, we’re hitting some kind of limit.’ I really doubt it,” he says. “We have a roadmap to 50x more transistors and huge steps to make on every single piece of the stack.