14 DAY TRIAL // In the near future, Intel plans to develop more of its processors as system-on-a-chip (SoC) devices, revealed a high ranking company official in an interview that was just published on the Web.
Talking with Nordic Hardware about its CPUs, Pat Bliemer, Managing Director for Northern Europe and Benelux at Intel said:
"I think that is what Intel has demonstrated for the last 40 years what we can do as a company. We indeed believe that the future of the chip will be system-on-a-chip.
“So you will see more and more of our product lines go towards that SoC type of model," concluded Bliemer.
The company official refrained himself from revealing more details about these future processors, but it did say that Intel is planning to integrated more dedicated logic inside its chips to speed up various types of applications.
“There’s a company called Silicon Hive, which does graphics post-processing for example. They have very unique IP and basically little chips and that is stuff we can start building into these SoC’s as well," said Bliemer.
From the info that is available at this time, we know that the Broadwell CPU will be Intel’s first processor to feature a true SoC design as it includes features such as Ethernet, Thunderbolt or USB 3.0 right on the chip’s die.
Intel is expected to release Broadwell in 2014, and the processor will come as the 14nm die shrink of Haswell which means that many of the technologies to be introduced in this architecture will also be present in this SoC.
These include support for the AVX2 instruction set, but also a series of changes that target to improve the processor’s IPC performance and its graphics capabilities.