Intel CPU job ad mentions 'unified core' team - is Royal Core being resurrected for 2028?

Intel is apparently moving towards the rumored goal of a unified core strategy for its processors, or so a recent job advert suggests.

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Olrak29 on X (via Wccftech) spotted the ad for a senior CPU verification engineer at Intel, which mentions seeking a highly motivated individual to join the 'Unified Core' design team.

As you're doubtless aware, Intel's current hybrid approach for CPU cores is to have them split into performance and efficiency cores (and of late, a scattering of low-power cores, too).

The idea is to switch to a CPU design which again makes all cores the same - except this time they'll be 'big' cores able to pull off a mighty level of single-core performance (a pc gamer's dream). At the same time, at least going by Intel's previous leaked concepts (Royal Core), those beefy cores could be split up into smaller threads ('rentable units') for multi-threaded tasks.

In short, while the Royal Core scheme was seemingly abandoned by Intel some time ago, it appears to be making a comeback.

As to exactly what generation this big core approach might debut with, as Wccftech theorizes, 2028 looks like the earliest we might see such a new design - with Titan Lake (as rumored). So, that won't be the successor to Nova Lake (which is Razer Lake), but the generation after.

Speaking of Nova Lake, while we were expecting the next-gen desktop processors to debut later this year, Intel is seemingly now looking at a CES 2027 launch (although I can't say I'm surprised, as I always had a feeling this would be the case despite what the rumor mill claimed).