Sunny Cove is codename for Intel's first truly new performance CPU core design since "Skylake," and made its debut with the company's 10 nm "Ice Lake" processors, packing the first tangible IPC increase in years. VLSI guru Jim Keller is leading the effort to build Intel's future CPU core designs, and dropped a big hint on what to expect, speaking at a gathering in U.C. Berkeley. It's unclear which specific core Keller is referring to. The immediate successor to "Sunny Cove" is codenamed "Willow Cove," and Intel's own public sketch hints at an incremental upgrade over Sunny Cove, with faster caches and process-level optimization. It's only with "Golden Cove," slated for 2021, that Intel speaks of its next round of IPC increases (dubbed "ST perf"). It's plausible that Keller is referring to this core since a 2021 launch would fit better with a 2018-19 design phase.

In his talk, Keller describes Intel's next big CPU core as being "significantly bigger" than "Sunny Cove," with its 800-wide instruction window, and "massive" data- and branch-predictors, to put Intel back on a linear performance growth trajectory between generations. Keller also commented on this being a "mindset change" at Intel, which over the past decade, only delivered minor IPC increments between generations, and focused on other areas, such as efficiency. In stark contrast, through the 1990s and 2000s, Intel delivered IPC leaps between generations, such as the one between "Netburst" and "Conroe," and onwards to "Nehalem." These were in-part helped by rapid process advancements that slowed in the 2010s as Intel approached the sub-10 nm scale.