After years of using the same fundamental design of processing cores in its desktop CPUs, it looks like Intel will mix things up a bit with its upcoming Arrow Lake architecture. Instead of two rows of main or Performance cores, followed by multiple banks of Efficient cores in recent designs, Arrow Lake could shift to a repeating sequence of blocks, containing four P cores and two banks of four E cores. And it could all be because to the use of profitable units.
The idea that Intel could be changing the layout of its processor cores has been suggested by Kepler_L2 in X and then confirmed by Bionic_Squash, two people highly respected for being quite accurate in terms of leaks and industry rumors.
The block diagram in the post is a mockup of the arrangement of the P and E cores that Intel will supposedly use in Arrow Lake and shows that the design uses a repeating pattern of four P cores surrounding two banks of four E cores.
That's markedly different from what cores are like on more recent architectures, Meteor Lake and Raptor Lake Update—If the diagram is correct, then it would be the first big change to the core design since Intel introduced the E-core in its desktop chips in Alder Lake in 2021. In fact, Intel's designs have barely changed since Sandy Bridge in 2011, as the The format has worked very well.
Back then, people like Core i7 2700K It had four cores in a row, all connected to a ring bus that allowed fast access to the shared L3 cache. Over successive generations of chip designs, Intel added more cores by simply lengthening the row and then adding a second row. The last architecture before the hybrid era, rocket lake In 2021, it consisted of two rows of four cores, with the bus between the rows.
That didn't change with the introduction of E cores with Alder Lake, as they were simply added to the end of the rows of P cores, and the ring bus was made longer to accommodate them. It's still that way now in Raptor Lake Refresh, and even the smaller compute mosaic in Meteor Lake Laptop CPUs are arranged this way.
The Kepler_L2 diagram is noticeably different to this one though, but the obvious question is: why? One possibility is that it's simply a matter of design efficiency, reducing hot spot temperatures, leakage current and core-to-core latencies. But the scale of the change suggests it could be more significant than this and the other possible explanation is that Intel could be testing its Profitable Units (RU) idea in Arrow Lake.
This is something that Intel patented a while back and is essentially a complex circuit that divides threads into sections based on instruction complexity and issues those partitions to the appropriate P or E core depending on what needs to be processed in that partition.
By having a single block of four P cores and eight E cores, Intel could have designed Arrow Lake so that each block had its own RU, creating something that was relatively easy to scale. Lower-end models would have one or two blocks, with some cores disabled, while higher-spec processors could have four or more blocks.
Intel will also want to take full advantage of its Skymont E core design in Arrow Lake. The new efficiency cores are claimed to have a higher IPC (instruction per clock rate) than Raptor Lake P coreswhich is why Intel did not provide the Lunar Lake P cores with any HyperThreading (HT) hardware.
It has been rumored for a long time that Arrow Lake won't sport HT either Additionally, a 15th-gen Core processor with eight P cores and 16 E cores would only be a 24-thread chip. That’s a considerable drop from the 32 supported by the Core i9 14900K, so I don’t think Intel will do this with the high-end Arrow Lake desktop CPUs.
However, you could do this for lower-end models like the i7 and i5 to help the more powerful processors stand out more. On the other hand, there's not much point in using RUs. and HT at the same time, since the general idea is that the former is more flexible than the latter.
Of course, two people on social media saying this is what Arrow Lake's main design looks like is in no way concrete evidence of change, nor is it entirely indicative that rental units are on the way.
But this is all true and Intel has worked to improve the way its P and E cores are used, so the changes will be very welcome, especially considering how much Intel has improved its efficiency cores for Lunar Lake.
For PC gaming, it probably won't make a huge difference, as six to eight P cores with HyperThreading is still more than enough for the vast majority of games out there, but for content creation, better multi-threaded performance is a must.
This is particularly important since AMD 16-core Ryzen powered by Zen 5 The processors will be on the market very soon and will almost certainly set a new standard for multi-core speed.
