When it comes to the core architecture, or well actually any architecture, Intel hasn’t made a lot of progress in the last 4-5 years. We’ve been seeing the Skylake core repeatedly return four times in a row, with a fifth rehash expected shortly, in the form of Comet Lake. Intel finally seems ready to let go of the Skylake core, but perhaps not the 14nm node. A CPU spotted on SiSoft appears to be based on a new architecture, and definitely not Comet Lake.
At first sight, it looks like the upcoming Comet Lake-S based i5-10600K: hex-core chip with hyperthreading. However, on having a look at the cache configuration, things get confusing. This 6-core CPU has a cache size of 9MB L3 and 1.25MB L2 per core which is much higher than any Intel CPU in existence.
The Comet Lake-S based Core i5-10600K packs 12MB of L3 cache and 256 KB of L2 cache per core which totals up to 3 MB of L2 cache. The six-core chip spotted on SiSoft (supposed i5-11600K) packs a total of 7.5MB L2 cache and the 9MB of L3. This is the largest L2 cache I’ve seen in the consumer space in quite a while. The cache does help with gaming performance, so I wouldn’t be surprised if its a next-gen CPU based on the Sunny Cove or Willow Cove architecture.
It’s most likely the latter considering that the leaked Tiger Lake chips also feature the same amount of L2 cache. In comparison, both the Comet Lake and Coffee Lake chips feature just 256 KB of L2 cache, per core. The L3 cache is higher on the 10th Gen lineup, though by just a few MB.
We’ve been hearing a lot about backporting. So perhaps this is a backport of the Willow Cove core (Tiger Lake) on the 14nm node. Or it could be a new 10nm based Tiger Lake CPU for consumer desktops, you never know. Regardless, this means that Intel is finally ditching the Skylake core after more than half a decade of refreshed lineups based on it. We’ll keep you posted!
