Monday, September 23rd 2024
Intel's 8P+32E "Arrow Lake Refresh" Rumored Cancelled
Intel's new 8P+16E "Arrow Lake" silicon powers not just the company's upcoming Socket LGA1851 desktop processors as the "Arrow Lake-S," but also its enthusiast mobile processors, as the "Arrow Lake-HX." The company is debuting this silicon later this year with the Core Ultra 200-series, which will see a ramp through 2025 across its desktop and mobile variants, but Intel is (or rather, was) slated to introduce an "Arrow Lake Refresh" microarchitecture as a follow-up, with a late-2025 debut and 2026 ramp. According to Olrak29, a reliable source with Intel leaks, this refresh has been cancelled.
The "Arrow Lake Refresh" microarchitecture would have been unlike "Raptor Lake Refresh," which was essentially the same silicon, but powering speed bumped SKUs under a newer 14th Gen Core branding, it would have been a physically larger chip, with more cores. Specifically, Intel would give the "Arrow Lake Refresh" an 8P+32E configuration, with eight "Lion Cove" performance cores, and eight "Skymont" E-core clusters for 32 efficiency cores. Intel claimed to have made huge strides with increasing the IPC of its E-cores with "Skymont," and the 8P+32E "Arrow Lake Refresh" would have been a multithreaded performance monstrosity.
There are many reasons Intel could have cancelled the 8P+32E "Arrow Lake Refresh." It probably finds its maxed out Core Ultra 9 285K competitive with the Ryzen 9 9950X in multithreaded productivity workloads; or it's simply cutting costs from having a new silicon release cycle, and will probably just release speed bumps for the 8P+16E silicon, like it did with the "Raptor Lake Refresh," regardless of how the 285K is competitive against the 9950X, or the possible 9950X3D.
Intel's public or leaked roadmaps see the "Nova Lake-S" succeed "Arrow Lake-S" on desktop, with its introduction slated for 2026, which should mean that the upcoming "Arrow Lake-S," and its possible refresh with an unchanged core-count, has to face AMD for at least 2 years. AMD recently released the "Zen 5" microarchitecture, which was received with mixed reviews, but could claw back with variants of the chip that feature 3D V-cache, under the Ryzen 9000X3D series. AMD confirmed that its succeeding "Zen 6" microarchitecture is on-track for a 2025 unveiling, with product launches expected either within 2025 or in 2026.
Meanwhile, Intel has bigger problems. Its underperformance in the stock markets means that the company is exposed to either amicable or hostile takeover moves, with the most recent utterance of the A-word coming from Qualcomm, according to a WSJ report.
The "Arrow Lake Refresh" microarchitecture would have been unlike "Raptor Lake Refresh," which was essentially the same silicon, but powering speed bumped SKUs under a newer 14th Gen Core branding, it would have been a physically larger chip, with more cores. Specifically, Intel would give the "Arrow Lake Refresh" an 8P+32E configuration, with eight "Lion Cove" performance cores, and eight "Skymont" E-core clusters for 32 efficiency cores. Intel claimed to have made huge strides with increasing the IPC of its E-cores with "Skymont," and the 8P+32E "Arrow Lake Refresh" would have been a multithreaded performance monstrosity.
Intel's public or leaked roadmaps see the "Nova Lake-S" succeed "Arrow Lake-S" on desktop, with its introduction slated for 2026, which should mean that the upcoming "Arrow Lake-S," and its possible refresh with an unchanged core-count, has to face AMD for at least 2 years. AMD recently released the "Zen 5" microarchitecture, which was received with mixed reviews, but could claw back with variants of the chip that feature 3D V-cache, under the Ryzen 9000X3D series. AMD confirmed that its succeeding "Zen 6" microarchitecture is on-track for a 2025 unveiling, with product launches expected either within 2025 or in 2026.
Meanwhile, Intel has bigger problems. Its underperformance in the stock markets means that the company is exposed to either amicable or hostile takeover moves, with the most recent utterance of the A-word coming from Qualcomm, according to a WSJ report.
40 Comments on Intel's 8P+32E "Arrow Lake Refresh" Rumored Cancelled
Intel sees that it's manufacturing is doing well, probably better than expected, so they might think they can bring their next CPU line(Nova Lake) closer for release, meaning a refresh of ARL wouldn't be making sense, especially when they will have to pay TSMC to build it.
Yes, there will be probably be quite a few people running such thing, but it's absolutely not at stock and they can't sell a chip on such grounds.
A 32-core x86 processor in PC would have been pretty outlandish back in 2008, even though it was supposed to be a GPU.
The next iteration of Xeon Phi which is Knight Landing then used a modified Atom core(Airmont) also with SMT 4 having chips with up to 72 cores. Those atom cores are what we know today as E cores or rather being a direct lineage from it as architecture wise it went
Airmont -> Goldmont -> Tremont -> Gracemont(Alder/Raptor lake E-core) -> Crestmont(Meteor Lake E core) -> Skymont (Arrow and Lunar Lake E-cores).
So it did already happened in the past though those were modified versions of it, with the mentioned Hyper Threading x4 and also having full fat AVX512 implementations.
For other consumer products, we could argue that the PS3 processor, the Cell engine, was also very similar. It had a single 'fast' core and 8 others slower(same clock but lower IPC due to simpler design) cores(but which had strong vector capabilities).
Though those cores didn't have direct access to the system memory and had only indirect access through DMA.
It doesn't seem like the idea of many very simple cores paid off as the Atom line basically developed into basically big cores with very complex out of order designs instead of the simpler in order designs of the past. And maybe that is why Intel cancelled 8+32, there was just too little tangible benefit to have that many cores for the intended consumers.
For those who actually can use such high core counts, they would likely be best served by the Xeon W or Threadrippers series.