With the arrival of Alder Lake-S Intel carried out an important change in its general consumer processors, since it opted to introduce a division of two types of nuclei, the P and the E. The former are considered high-performance cores, and the latter as high-efficiency cores that balance consumption and power.
It is not a simple division of equal cores with different working frequencies, each type of kernel uses a different architecturewhich means that it has completely different characteristics, an IPC and a consumption, so much so that we could almost say that it is like integrating two types of processors into one.
This strategy has been maintained with Raptor Lake-S, and also with Arrow Lake-S. The most recent roadmaps that I have been able to see indicate that both Panther Lake-S and Nova Lake-S, which will arrive in 2025 and 2026, respectively, will continue to use that division of P cores and E cores, but a recent rumor says that This could completely change with the Griffin Cove architecturewhich will be used in the new processors that Intel will launch between 2027 and 2028.
Intel and the return to a unified architecture
First of all, it is important to keep in mind that Intel’s roadmap may change, and therefore this possible return to a CPU design with a single type of cores is not definitive and that could not be fulfilled, so we must take this information very carefully.
The source who leaked this rumor says that Griffin Cove will be an architecture that will use the Intel A14-P node, an important evolution of the Intel 18A-P node, and that could use some of the characteristics of the architecture that Beast Lake was going to use, a generation of processors that in theory was going to be the first to use only high-performance cores, but in the end it ended up being cancelled.
Griffin Cove would only have P cores, and these would offer an improvement in the CPI of between 10% and 20% over the previous generationNova Lake, which in turn would represent an IPC improvement of between 9% and 18% compared to Panther Lake, which would have between 5% and 13% more IPC than Arrow Lake-S. If we start adding percentages, the cumulative IPC improvement with Griffin Cove compared to Arrow Lake-S would be very large.
The Intel 14A node will be the chip giant’s rival for the TSMC 2nm nodeat least in theory, and should enter the production phase in 2026. It is important to keep in mind that this new architecture without P cores could be one more option within the Intel catalog, and that it does not have to mean an absolute abandonment of the designs with P cores and E cores.
Source: www.muycomputer.com
