Intel Plans Return to Unified Core Design, No More Performance and Efficiency Core Split

According to the latest job listings, we learn that Intel is planning the return of a unified core architecture, something we haven’t been accustomed to in the last few years. Starting with the 12th Generation “Alder Lake” processors, Intel began selling hybrid core processors that combine “Golden Cove” performance cores and “Gracemont” efficient cores. These became commonly known as P and E-Cores, which are now being used across Intel products in hybrid designs or P/E-core-only Xeon processors, of course, with the latest designs and iterations. However, as the new job listings suggest, Intel is assembling a team of engineers for its “Unified Core” design group that will deliver the new microarchitecture to power the next generation of processors.

Separating the core design into P-Cores and E-Cores has yielded Intel the desired results that the company hoped for. This includes product separation and many goals across platforms. For example, in the consumer sector, E-Cores run a lot of side and background tasks in the operating system, while P-Cores power main applications like games. To extract maximum performance, Intel has a dedicated Thread Director that makes the entire process work and dictates just what application goes to which core, in tandem with the operating system. Intel also provides P-Core-only and E-Core-only Xeon server processors that serve either performance sectors like HPC and AI or the cloud sector that needs many cores with somewhat lower performance, but in a dense 100-core+ package.

With a unification of the P-Core and E-Cores, Intel would have to look into other techniques for separating its product offerings. That can simply be done by using smaller cache capacities, as L2 and L3 cache occupy a huge percentage of the CPU die, just like AMD does with Zen 5 and Zen 5c. We can hope to see other ways, as Intel’s Unified Core design team could bring surprises and some interesting new technologies. The timeline for the launch of this “Unified Core” is still unknown, as the design is probably in the early stages. These processes take years, and it is likely that this new core design will be launching by the end of the decade. Until then, we are looking into the hybrid core design like we have been using in recent years.