We’re hearing good things about Intel’s future client processors. The chipmaker is poised to launch its 14th Gen Meteor Lake processors for notebooks and convertibles later this year. Based on the Redwood Cove/Crestmont core architectures and the Intel 4 process node, these chips will be the best of their kind. Following Meteor Lake, we have 15th Gen Arrow Lake, which will be a desktop-centric stack with 24 cores and 32 threads. A 40-core (8P + 32E) part is also anticipated but not confirmed.
The 15th Gen Arrow Lake processors will be at least 21% faster than existing Raptor Lake-S offerings. They’ll be the first to ditch hyper-threading, paving the way for Rentable Units Cores in the future generations.
16th Gen Panther Lake, leveraging the Cougar Cove core, will leverage the Rentable Unit Cores, offering a 40% IPC uplift over an earlier designed 4-way hyper-threaded model. According to Moore’s Law is Dead, RUs are something akin to addressable cores, packed in groups of two, each with a chunk of SRAM and sharing MLC per unit.
These cores are grouped into units and take up notably less space. However, they can be boosted (four of them) to incredible levels, providing a substantial IPC boost in lightly threaded workloads. As always, take rumors like this with a grain of salt.
