Rare Intel Cannon Lake CPU Emerges With Three Chiplets
A mysterious Intel Cannon Lake prototype processor has arrived, featuring up to 3 chiplets.hardware leaker YuuKi_AnS (opens in new tab) Share images on Twitter and be a CPU expert sky juice 60 (opens in new tab) Details of the function of the third die.
The third chiplet is said to act as the CPU’s Integrated Voltage Regulator (IVR), a feature that dates back to Intel’s Haswell (and Devil’s Canyon) 4th generation CPU architecture several years ago. However, Cannon’s implementation is known as the Multi-Chip Integrated Voltage Regulator (McIVR) because of the additional die.
IVR first debuted in 2013 on Intel’s 4th generation Haswell architecture. IVR has changed the way motherboards and processors handle power delivery. Transferred the CPU voltage regulation directly from the motherboard to the CPU die.
According to Intel, this greatly simplifies the Haswell platform’s power delivery design, allowing the IVR to replace five voltage regulators on the mainboard with one inside the CPU. Another advantage of this design is the finer control over the processor voltage regulation. However, Intel eventually canceled his IVR for all mainstream desktop architectures following 5th Gen Broadwell chips, for unknown reasons. However, we believe its removal is related to thermal issues and die size constraints. Nonetheless, IVR has reappeared in other architectures following Haswell, such as some mobile his architectures and Intel’s Skylake-X HEDT architecture.
It looks like Intel also had plans to integrate an IVR into their Cannon Lake mobile processors, and this prototype is proof of that idea. What makes the IVR unique in Cannon Lake, however, is its multi-chip implementation.
This approach makes a lot of sense from Intel’s point of view and could significantly improve the voltage headroom and temperature limits of the chip. In his previous IVR designs, especially Haswell, the CPU cooler had to deal with the heat from the combination of voltage regulator and CPU core, integrated graphics, and CPU cache, which made the chip very hot.
It wasn’t a big deal for regular users, but many overlockers with temperature limits rather than voltage limits on mid-range air coolers caused problems.
With mobile chips, the situation is very similar to overlockers. Notebook CPU coolers are much smaller than desktop coolers, so the CPU needs to be as thermally efficient as possible. Moving the IVR to another die does just that, distributing the heat to another area and allowing the CPU cooler to handle heat transfer more effectively.
Unfortunately, this triple chiplet design never made it to market. Cannon Lake is Intel’s first released so far, featuring a horrible implementation of Intel’s first 10nm process (now rebranded as Intel 7), less than two years of support, and only one CPU supporting architecture. was one of the worst architectures of