Willow Cove is a

codename A code name, call sign or cryptonym is a Code word (figure of speech), code word or name used, sometimes clandestinely, to refer to another name, word, project, or person. Code names are often used for military purposes, or in espionage. They may ...

for a CPU microarchitecture developed by

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

and released in September 2020. Willow Cove is the successor to the Sunny Cove microarchitecture, and is fabricated using Intel's enhanced 10 nm

process node Semiconductor device fabrication is the process used to manufacture semiconductor devices, typically integrated circuit (IC) chips such as modern computer processors, microcontrollers, and memory chips such as NAND flash and DRAM that are pres ...

called 10 nm SuperFin (10SF). The microarchitecture powers 11th-generation

Intel Core Intel Core is a line of streamlined midrange consumer, workstation and enthusiast computer central processing units (CPUs) marketed by Intel Corporation. These processors displaced the existing mid- to high-end Pentium processors at the time ...

mobile processors (codenamed "

Tiger Lake Tiger Lake is Intel's codename for the 11th generation Intel Core mobile processors based on the new Willow Cove Core microarchitecture, manufactured using Intel's third-generation 10 nm process node known as 10SF ("10 nm SuperFin"). Ti ...

"). The Willow Cove microarchitecture was succeeded by

Golden Cove Golden Cove is a codename for a CPU microarchitecture developed by Intel and released in November 2021. It succeeds four microarchitectures: Sunny Cove, Skylake, Willow Cove, and Cypress Cove. It is fabricated using Intel's Intel 7 process no ...

Features

Intel first described Tiger Lake and Willow Cove during their Architecture Day in 2020. Willow Cove is almost identical to the previous microarchitecture but introduces new security features, a redesigned cache subsystem, and higher clock speeds. Intel claims that these changes, in addition to the new 10SF process node, give an additional 10–20% performance increase from Sunny Cove.

Improvements

* Larger L2 caches (1.25 MB per core from 512 KB per core) * Larger L3 caches (3 MB per core from 2 MB per core) * A new

AVX-512 AVX-512 are 512-bit extensions to the 256-bit Advanced Vector Extensions SIMD instructions for x86 instruction set architecture (ISA) proposed by Intel in July 2013, and implemented in Intel's Xeon Phi x200 (Knights Landing) and Skylake-X CPUs; thi ...

instruction: Vector Pair Intersection to a Pair of Mask Registers, VP2INTERSECT * Control Flow Enforcement Technology to prevent return-oriented programming and jump-oriented programming exploitation techniques * Full memory (

RAM Ram, ram, or RAM may refer to: Animals * A male sheep * Ram cichlid, a freshwater tropical fish People * Ram (given name) * Ram (surname) * Ram (director) (Ramsubramaniam), an Indian Tamil film director * RAM (musician) (born 1974), Dutch * ...

) encryption * Indirect branch tracking and shadow stack * Intel Key Locker * AVX/

AVX2 Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) are extensions to the x86 instruction set architecture for microprocessors from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). They were proposed by Intel in March 2008 and first supported by Intel with the Sandy Bridge ...

instructions support for Pentium Gold and Celeron processors has been unlocked

Products

Willow Cove powers Intel's 11th-generation Intel Core mobile processors (codenamed ''Tiger Lake''). Tiger Lake-U processors were released on September 2, 2020, while Tiger Lake-H35 were released on January 11, 2021. Tiger Lake-H processors were launched on May 11, 2021.

References

{{Intel processors X86 microarchitectures Intel Intel microarchitectures