Since Alder Lake (12th Gen Core), Intel has adopted the P-core / E-core design and delegate workloads based on performance and power efficiency demands; and while this approach does improve the power efficiency, it looks like the chipmaker may move on to a new ‘unified core’ design to further push the envelope.
Unified Core Is Back On Intel’s Menu
In case this term may sound unfamiliar to you, just know that everything before Alder Lake are considered as unified core designs, meaning there will be no distinction between each core on the same CPU. As for the reason behind this shift, we have to look at Intel’s roadmap for its CPUs originated from Zhihu (China’s version of Quora), as discovered by @Silicon_fly on X (Twitter).
The roadmap listed the codenames for future generation products, starting from Panther Lake as the upcoming replacement for Lunar Lake in the laptop segment, followed by Nova Lake succeeding the full Arrow Lake family in laptops and desktops alike. Beyond that, we have lesser-known names including Razer Lake, and finally Titan Lake – this is the one that will ditch the P/E-core design and go back to the unified core design, according to this list.
Interestingly, the unified design will not be based on P-cores; instead, Nova Lake’s E-core architecture, Arctic Wolf, will act as the base for future core designs from this point on. As it is today, E-cores do offer several advantages, including smaller physical size relative to performance (performance per area, PPA), and better power efficiency (performance per Watt, PPW).
Since it is known that Intel is targeting a 52-core design on Nova Lake (consisting of 16 P-cores, 32 E-cores and 4 additional LPE-cores), this new unified design with denser cores could allow more cores to be fit in the same area, allowing for greater overall performance (up to 100 cores was speculated). AMD already adopted a similar principle with some of their EPYC datacenter processors, fitting up to 192 Zen5c cores on a single chip, as opposed to 128 Zen5 cores on a standard version.
Pokdepinion: Quite surprising it is still possible to do unified core designs while still matching the performance and efficiency demands.
