Sad day for gamers: Intel's 36-core Beast Lake CPU, rumored to blow away AMD's X3D, is canceled

Remember the rumors about Intel's Beast Lake processors, silicon designed to be highly performant gaming chips, which sounded all very exciting? Well, that excitement has been well and truly quelled with the news that Beast Lake is apparently canceled.

That's the latest from YouTube leaker Moore's Law is Dead (MLID), who tells us that Beast Lake - which he first aired info on, and apparently represented the "full realization of Intel's Royal Core project" - is now canned.

The flagship for Beast Lake was, in theory, a chip with 4 'extra big' cores (very high performance) plus 32 efficiency cores, a mixture which could have been seriously potent in terms of driving gaming frame rates - or that was certainly the idea.

How far off the drawing board this ever got, though, we guess we'll never know, but MLID is pretty clear that it isn't happening now.

MLID clarifies that the elements of Beast Lake, such as the Royal Core architecture, and indeed the 'rentable units' we've been hearing about Team Blue working on, are still very much alive, but they will be going into different CPU ranges (Nova Lake is mentioned in the latter case, as it has been previously). It's just Beast Lake which has been put out to pasture, not the underlying technologies here.

This is disappointing given that it comes on top of a lot of negative news filtering out of Intel right now, not the least of which is the whole thorny issue of stability, and how that might affect next-gen Arrow Lake sales as consumers are rapidly losing trust in Team Blue (or certainly that's the case for some folks out there).

The whispers around Beast Lake were of a mighty gaming CPU with jaw-dropping single-core performance to take on AMD's X3D silicon, but - that simply won't be happening. Also, Arrow Lake may end up going up against Ryzen 9000 X3D chips, if the rumors around the respective launch schedules of AMD and Intel pan out.