Intel's scrapped Beast Lake CPU rumored with 2x IPC over Raptor Lake, Pat Gelsinger killed it

Intel has been suffering of late, we all know it, but the "Royal Core" project was meant to destroy Zen 5... and rumor has it, CEO Pat Gelsinger killed the project.

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Intel hired Jim Keller years ago -- the father of the Zen CPU architecture from AMD -- who worked on the "Royal Core Project" which was an architecture that moved past Core, which would be the largest upgrade in CPU architecture for Intel in decades.

2024: Arrow Lake was (meant to be) the bridge architecture to "Royal Core". Hyper-Threading was removed with the knowledge that it was going away soon anyways, and so it was time to focus on any extra single-threading you can get by simplifying the core design.

Well, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger -- in his infinite wisdom -- scrapped Jim Keller's incredible vision. Moore's Law is Dead has leaked the now-cancelled Royal Core roadmap, and what a road it would've been for Intel. The biggest change would've been "Rentable Units" that would've dynamically split P-Cores into smaller cores as needed.

• Read more: Intel's Royal Core: Lunar Lake CPU designed to KILL new AMD Zen 5
• Read more: Intel's next-gen consumer CPU platform will be Nova Lake-S, Panther Lake could be mobile only

Far out... that would've been exciting. Instead of losing P-Core counts and getting smaller and more efficient cores, there would've been monster cores with "Rentable Units". These RU modules would have 2 threads per RU module, which wasn't Hyper-Threading. If you need lots of performance... they stay as one, if you need more threads, they split up dynamically. That. Would've. Been. Exciting, Intel.

MLID's information sees Beast Lake as "Royal Core 1.1" with Intel settling on a 12P+16E design for the CPU tile, reusing the GPU and SoC layout from Nova Lake. Beast Lake Next however, would've been a "full Royal Core 2.0" with MLID saying this would've been the "full realization of Jim Keller's vision".

Beast Lake Next would've reportedly featured a desktop CPU tile with a 6P+0E design, but with what would've been an incredible 4 threads of RU module. This means when needed, Beast Lake Next would've been a 6P+0E CPU, that could act like a 4+8 processor, or a 2+16 processor... but get this... the 'non-split' cores were expected ot have double the IPC performance of Raptor Lake.

Damn.