Intel engineer teases 'Griffin Cove' development: previous Intel nodes 'got them into trouble'

Intel's Senior Principal Engineer in Core Design Ori Lempel has revealed the company is already working on the "great-grandchild" of Lion Cove, which will materialize into Griffin Cove.

We know the company has been suffering in its CPU division for many, many generations now, with the real issues kicking off around its 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" CPUs. But in a recent interview with Intel's Senior Principal Engineer in Core Design Ori Lempel and KitGuru, we're finding out more details of what Team Blue has up its sleeve in the form of Griffin Cove.

Lempel reiterated that Intel has finished its work with Cougar Cove, which will be used inside of its next-gen Panther Lake SoCs which are expected to ship in 2H 2025. It looks like the successor to Cougar Cove will be Griffin Cove, but nothing is official yet... we have heard in rumors from MLID that Griffin Cove would drop in 2027 and beyond with a "Unified Core" that eliminates E-Cores from the desktop CPU.

Lempel also said that Intel's CPU design team has now evolved to a point where they operate on a "99% process node agnostic" approach, meaning that the team has some flexibility over which node they would like to use on a particular family of CPUs. Ex-CEO of Intel, Pat Gelsinger, had his "IDM 2.0" approach that saw the company focused on using their in-house process nodes for CPU designs.

However, the processes used displayed disappointing performance against the competition, or poor yield rates, meaning that CPU designs needed to be re-evaluated, which costs money... and no company wants to do that. With the more liberal approach, Intel can now make sure "libraries, analog components, and designs can be synthesized for any node" meaning Intel won't hesitate in dual-sourcing its process nodes.

Intel has been relying on its in-house Intel Foundry Services (IFS) for its CPU designs for years now, and that has been a massive contributing factor to its issues competing against AMD. It looks like Intel will be tapping external semiconductor foundries -- TSMC -- for its future processors, something it has been doing in dribs and drabs, but balancing its chips being fabbed on its on in-house nodes (Intel 18A, etc) will occur alongside TSMC nodes (like N3, etc).