Intel’s ‘Royal Era’ Cores could leave Apple’s and AMD’s competitors in the dust

The latest leak posted by Moore’s Law is Dead reveals the future ‘Royal Core’ era which will start with the release of the company’s Lunar Lake & further extend to Nova Lake by 2025. we have already heard the codenames and expected performance targets of Intel’s next-gen core families.

The three lines up which will be released after the Meteor Lake is codenamed Arrow Lake, Lunar Lake, and Nova Lake. Now MLID has added some more details about the upcoming lineups. The leakers have stated that the Alder Lake to Meteor Lake shake-up is simply Intel getting warmed up for its end game which is to offer a perfected tile-chip design that would either use a 2.5D or 3D stacking architecture.

MLID terms this as not just the goal of intel but as the vision set by Jim Keller who helped design these next-gen core architectures. The post-Meteor Lake lineup will be nothing like what Intel has launched before and this will shake the entire market. Jim Keller has internally referred to the architecture as ‘Royal Core’ making it sound like a step beyond the traditional core architecture.

The first of the ‘Royal Core’ would be the Lion Cove architecture, expected to debut along with the 15th Gen Arrow Lake family and will eventually be perfect on the 16th Gen Lunar Lake family. According to sources, the Royal Core design will be improved in the 17th Gen Nova Lake family and the leaker has further stated that the perfected Lion Cove design in Lunar Lake will be Intel’s first win over Apple’s next-gen ARM architecture.

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Compared to Golden Cove, Lion Cove will bring at least 30% IPC jump and another 5-10% jump with Lunar Lake & further extended with Panther Cove cores for Nova Lake. So let’s come to the lineup one by one.

Intel 15th Gen Arrow Lake ‘Intel 4’ CPUs

first is the new Arrow Lake line of chips and it will be the architectural update on the Intel 4 process node. Intel’s Arrow Lake CPUs will feature an updated compute tile with Lion Cove & Skymont cores in up to 40 core configurations (8 Big + 32 Small cores). It is stated that the performance of the CPU will be on par with AMD and Apple processors meaning that these CPUs will offer a double-digit gain over the predecessors.

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Intel 16th Gen Lunar Lake ‘Intel 3’ CPUs

The 16th Gen Lunar Lake chips will be the first CPUs manufactured on the Intel 3 process node and they will bring a performance that would be able to surpass the competing AMD and Apple processors in the market which is a pretty big deal. However, the chips are to be expected to launch in late 2024 or early 2025, and by then I expect Apple to shake up the market in its entirety.

Intel 17th Gen Nova Lake ‘Intel 3’ CPUs

Finally, we have the Nova Lake CPUs bringing along brand-new architectures known as Panther Cove and Darkmont to the table. This will be Intel’s biggest architectural uplift in Intel’s history, is expected to be even bigger than the Core architecture itself since its introduction in 2006.

The CPU performance built on the new architecture will reportedly offer more than 50% performance over the Lunar Lake chips. However, these chips will not launch till the end of 2025 or even move to 2026 at the earliest.

Intel Mainstream Desktop CPU Generations Comparison:

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