Recently confidential data from Intel on the upcoming 15th Gen Arrow Lake processors surfaced. Crucial information related to hyperthreading, a major feature of Intel processors, has been spotted by the German news site. Hyperthreading increases the total thread count of the CPU, providing better scheduling of ongoing tasks.
The confidential material was leaked by a X (formerly Twitter) user and has since been taken down. Now, the leaked Intel documents suggest the company could be planning to move away from hyper-threading completely!
This is a massive change in the processor’s architectural design. Moreover, Intel is moving to a new kind of core configuration for future processors. The change has already been implemented on Core Ultra processors for laptops.
A new type of LP E-core is being added to Intel processors. This stands for Low Power E-cores, also being referred to as Low Power Island. With more efficient scheduling, Intel wants to use this extremely low-power and super-efficient core type for background tasks. Anything that does not demand the compute requirements of P-cores & E-cores will run on LP E-cores instead.
The compute tile of the processor (on Meteor Lake architecture) has the performance (P) and efficiency (E) cores, but it is the SoC tile in which the low power (LP) efficiency cores lie. We could see a similar design implementation on Intel 15th Gen Arrow Lake, too.
How much will it affect performance if Intel Arrow Lake processors do not feature hyper-threading? For many workloads, including gaming, the impact will be minimal Older processors benefited from hyper-threading greatly, but this is not equivalently true for modern chips. Among new features, it is also expected for this Arrow Lake platform to come with an NPU for AI processing.
