Update 7/17: Headline corrected to reflect the article’s premise that Titan Lake’s core count is a speculation

Rumors about Intel’s upcoming Nova Lake and Panther Lake architectures have just begun trickling down, but we are now coming to know of some interesting plans from the Santa Clara giant for 2028.

If the grapevine is to be believed, Intel could potentially introduce the Titan Lake family in 2028 with…wait a minute…100 cores, yes you read that right! One hundred cores! And all these cores would be alike, meaning Intel will be ditching its current heterogenous P-core and E-core designs in favor of a unified core architecture.

This information comes via @Silicon_fly on X citing a post on Zhihu.com that shows a leaked roadmap for Intel processors up till 2028. According to this roadmap, Razer Lake in 2027 will be the last of its kind to use a heterogenous P-core/E-core design. Razer Lake will be comprised of Griffin Cove P-cores and Golden Eagle E-cores but will be a minor update to Nova Lake that is slated to come out next year.

A unified all E-core design based on Nova Lake’s Arctic Wolf

With Titan Lake, Intel is likely to unify all cores as one homogenous design. Interestingly, this unified core will be made not of P-cores but entirely of E-cores, presumably derived from Nova Lake’s larger Arctic Wolf E-cores. The advantage of such an approach would be better performance-per-area (PPA) and improved performance-per-Watt (PPW).

Any die size and power increase due to derivation from Arctic Wolf E-cores can be offset with increased PPA as a result of moving to a 14A process without unduly increasing the TDP. That being said, the newer unified E-cores would still be relatively compact than Coyote Cove and Griffin Cove P-cores in Nova Lake and Razer Lake, respectively.

Intel to toe AMD’s footsteps with dense and compact cores

While a unified core does indicate an all E-core design, there is still scope for a few differences. @Silicon_fly speculates that Intel could be using a combination of dense 4C clusters with shared L2 cache and 2C clusters with shared or dedicated L2/L3 caches. Titan Lake could also leverage a dedicated core optimized for single-core performance.

Considering that Nova Lake is already expected to offer a 52-core design with 16 P-cores, 32 E-cores, and 4 low power island E-cores (LPE), and if Titan Lake really ditches the large P-cores, a 100-core design with two 48-core clusters and an additional four LPE cores is not out of the realm of possibility.

All this is just speculation of course, and we are still a few generations away from Titan Lake, so take this with a pinch of salt for now.

The industry is moving away from dedicated efficiency cores

That being said, the information does tally with what we’ve been seeing elsewhere in the CPU/SoC space. AMD already uses a combination of Zen 5 classic and Zen 5c compact cores in its Ryzen Strix Point APUs. MediaTek opted for an all-big core 1+3+4 design ditching efficiency cores starting with the Dimensity 8400. The flagship Dimensity 9400 SoC also leverages a 1+3+4 big core cluster without any Cortex-A520 efficiency cores.

Similarly, Qualcomm too went with a 2 Prime + 6 Performance all-Oryon architecture for the Snapdragon 8 Elite. It remains to be seen what Apple has in store for upcoming A and M series chips, but the industry trends appear to be increasingly favoring homogenous core clusters tuned for handling various tasks than heterogenous designs.

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Though a cell and molecular biologist by training, I have been drawn towards computers from a very young age ever since I got my first PC in 1998. My passion for technology grew quite exponentially with the times, and it has been an incredible experience from being a much solicited source for tech advice and troubleshooting among family and friends to joining Notebookcheck in 2017 as a professional tech journalist. Now, I am a Lead Editor at Notebookcheck covering news and reviews encompassing a wide gamut of the technology landscape for Indian and global audiences. When I am not hunting for the next big story or taking complex measurements for reviews, you can find me unwinding to a nice read, listening to some soulful music, or trying out a new game.