Presentation slides allegedly containing details on upcoming Intel ‘Skymont’ Efficient-cores (E-cores) have leaked, claiming a large uplift in performance. We’re talking big gains compared to Crestmont E-cores currently powering Core Ultra 100 series processors, which even given previous generation Performance cores (P-cores) a run for their money.
For the uninitiated, P-cores and E-cores have been a part of the best CPUs Intel has to offer since its 12th Gen Core series. P-cores largely operate in a similar fashion to their homogeneous predecessors, the switch to a heterogeneous processor design with E-cores brings reductions in power consumption and silicon footprint. While innovative at the time, Intel hasn’t massively improved the performance of E-cores, even with its most recent Crestmont architecture succeeding Gracemont.
Now, after three generations, Intel is finally bringing sizeable improvements to the performance of its E-Cores. With its upcoming Lunar Lake processors, the company has developed a new E-Core design dubbed ‘Skymont’. According to the leaked slides, the architecture should bring double-digit IPC gains over the Crestmont E-cores.
Intel is achieving these improvements through an improved branch prediction unit, with 9-wide Decode and 8 Integer ALU. For reference, Crestmont offered a 6-wide Decode and 4 Integer ALU. We suspect the company will have more to say on everything Lunar Lake, Skymont or otherwise, at its Intel Innovation event later this year. More optimistically, we could learn more at Computex 2024.
Whether Intel Lunar Lake can keep pace with AMD Zen 5 remains to be seen, but Meteor Lake performance has so far left us wanting in laptops and handhelds. Failing that, though, Arrow Lake could prove the saving grace the company has been working towards in the face of difficulties competing with innovations like 3D V-Cache. After all, if our Core i9 14900K review and Ryzen 7 7800X3D review shows anything, it’s that more cache is sometimes better than more cores.
