According to our sources – the same who reported the development of Zen two days before official AMD public announcement – Intel is studying a new uArch in order to replace the current x86 uArchs in Desktop and Enterprise market.
TigerLake (2019) will be the last evolution step of this Core generation, started with Sandy Bridge (Developed by Haifa Team). We can say that Haswell, Skylake and Cannonlake are only main adjustment (Skylake is the first Intel uArch developed to battle from the Mobile market to the Enterprise market)
The next Intel uArch will be very similar to the approach used by AMD with Zen – perfect balance of power consumption/performance/price – but with a huge news: in order to save physical space (Smaller Die) and to improve the power consumption/performance ratio, Intel will throw away some old SIMD and old hardware remainders.
The 100% backward hardware x86 compatibility will not guaranteed anymore, but could be not a handicap (Some SIMD today are useless, and also we can use emulators or cloud systems). Nowadays a lot of software house have to develop code for ARM and for x86, but ARM is lacking useful SIMD. So, frequently, these software are a watered-down compromise.
Intel will be able to develop a thin and fast x86 uArch, and ICC will be able to optimize the code both for ARM and for x86 as well.
This new uArch will be ready in 2019-2020.