Intel Core Architecture

Intel Mesh Technology

The Cascade Lake X is based on the Skylake X microarchitecture, which saw the introduction of Intel’s mesh topology for communication between the processor cores rather than the traditional ring design. The mesh topology was originally developed on the Xeon Phi Knights Landing and is used on the Xeon Scalable family, but with Skylake-X as well as Cascade Lake-X the mesh design is now used on desktop processors. The importance with the mesh design is reduced latency in communication between processor cores. With the ring design the cores were connected by a ring that circles the cores. If a particular core needed information from another core, the communication followed along the ring until it reached the proper core. This method was very efficient with core configurations of eight or fewer, but as more cores were introduced the more delays occurred in communication. This was evident with one of the original high end enthusiast processors, the Broadwell-E, which used a ring topology to connect the 12 cores, but this proved to be very cumbersome. The mesh design allows communication between CPUs to be more efficient and done with less latency, which helps improve the performance of the CPU.

Intel Mesh Technology