It is being alleged that Intel is already working on the successor to its Lion Cove, Royal Core, as well as the successor that, known as Cobra Cove. Not only that, both CPU will be based on a new x86 microarchitecture.
The existence of the Intel Royal Core and Cobra Core was initially discovered by the South Korean outlet, Gamma0burst. Another confirmation of their existence comes by way of Intel Technical Lead Engineer, Antony Jose Emmatty, whose LinkedIn profile says that he and his team have been potentially working on the two architectures since 2023. To take an excerpt out of his profile he is currently the “Design Quality Lead and implementation of better methodology aspects incorporating Artificial Intelligence to make the SoC execution faster and effective with enhanced quality”.
Royal Core and Cobra marks a departure from Intel’s typical use of the “Cove” moniker, which it has used since its 12th generation Alder Lake lineup. The current microarchitecture, Lion Cove, is currently being utilised by the new Core Ultra 200V, otherwise known as Lunar Lake, and will soon arrive for desktop systems in the form of the Core Ultra 200 series, also known as Arrow Lake. One major change in Lion Cove is the absence of hyperthreading: the chipmaker has essentially done away with the technology, promising that the current architecture would deliver double-digit IPC improvements over Raptor Cove-powered CPUs.
With Royal Core, Intel seems adamant about focusing on both high performance and efficiency simultaneously. There’s not much else we can glean off, but again, the existence of the upcoming architecture does provide us with an idea of what the chipmaker wants after it completes its “five nodes in four years” plan, which we now know we can expect after the Intel 18A process.
(Source: ExtremeTech, Tom’s Hardware, Gamma0burst)
