Intel developing Cobra Core architecture on x86, potential successor to Royal Core

Intel is reportedly working on a next-generation Cobra Cove x86 architecture, which will power future-gen processors with higher performance and power efficiency.

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We've been hearing about Royal Core, a project started by chip legend Jim Keller, which was meant to power next-gen Nova Lake and Beast Lake, with Beast Lake Next thrown into that mix but reportedly canceled. Intel is starting the architectural change journey with its upcoming Core Ultra 200 series "Arrow Lake" CPUs, with a focus on single-core performance with the removal of Hyper-Threading.

Royal Cove has been rumored with an interesting introduction: Rentable Units, in its first generation lacking Hyper-Threading, but Royal Cove 1.1 was meant to feature a new method of Hyper-Threading which splits the P-Cores into two smaller cores, while Beast Lake Next used Royal Core 2.0 that was rumored to feature up to 4 threads per P-Core, but these were just rumors... and now we're hearing about Cobra Cove. Let's go.

The next-generation Cobra Cove architecture is based on the x86 architecture as well, and will offer new levels of performance and power efficiency compared to its competitors. We don't know whether Cobra Cove will be a desktop or mobile processor, but we should expect Cobra Cove to arrive after Royal Core variants, which will start with Nova Lake.

• Read more: Intel's Royal Core: Lunar Lake CPU designed to KILL new AMD Zen 5
• Read more: Intel's scrapped Beast Lake CPU rumored with 2x IPC over Raptor Lake
• Read more: Intel's next-gen consumer CPU platform is Nova Lake-S, Panther Lake mobile only

The leak from "gamme0burst" shows a visual roadmap (based on speculation, leaks) based on employee profiles and rumors. This points to Panther Lake, which is the successor to Arrow Lake, and will use Cougar Cove P-Cores and Darkmont E-Cores. Nova Lake, which replaces Panther Lake, uses Panther Cove P-Cores and Arctic Wolf E-Cores.