The next three years should prove very interesting in the desktop CPU market as both Intel and AMD gear up for a massive fight for market share. To counter AMD's 2017 launch of its new Ryzen CPUs,  Intel is also looking at bolstering its performance by ditching the Core architecture and streamlining the x86 instruction set architecture. The latter could be the biggest change we've seen to its CPUs since the introduction of multiple-core CPUs over a decade ago.

Intel has essentially been adding instructions on top of instructions to its x86 architecture. This isn't a bad thing, though, as these are actually used by a variety of tasks and programs. However, they do add bulk to the design of the CPU and many aren't used that often, if at all, and don't necessarily help to improve power efficiency or performance - the opposite can actually be true. It's some of these instructions that website www.bitsandchips.it is claiming, will be removed from Intel's CPUs in some future revisions, most likely after the TigerLake architecture is released in 2019.

This would allow it to create a much more streamlined architecture that also has more space on the CPU die and lower power consumption as a result. It may mean that as well as frequencies, cores and cache levels changing between generations, we may see instruction sets vary too - much more so than they have done anyway. The plus side is that power consumption should drop and there's scope for reaching much higher frequencies, as well as allowing Intel to better compete in areas where power consumption and efficiency are key - laptops and the mobile market for example.

Its Core architecture hasn't seen major upgrades for a number of years, with gains every release being fairly mediocre although still noticeable in benchmarks. Intel six-core CPUs are predicted to land on mainstream desktop PCs after the launch of its Kaby Lake CPUs in early 2017 (currently its mainstream desktop LGA1151 socket only supports quad-core CPUs), but not before AMD releases its Ryzen CPUs, which could give the company a top to bottom advantage, or at least offer up much more substantial competition to Intel than it has since the 2006 launch of Intel's Core architecture.

AMD has clearly been working hard behind the scenes and if early benchmarks are to be believed, it could well gain the upper hand in 2017 with its Ryzen CPUs. However, Intel has certainly got wind of this and has been preparing a broadside of its own. We may not see the impact of this for a couple of years, during which time decent competition could return to the PC processor market.

By: DocMemory
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