Intel's Cobra Core Architecture Flashes Its Fangs For Future CPUs

It can be tough to keep up with processor codenames, so let us lay it out for you. "Lunar Lake" is the code name for the new Intel mobile processors implementing "Lion Cove" P-cores and "Skymont" E-cores. Those same core architectures will show up in "Arrow Lake," the new high-power parts launching later this year. The successor to Lunar Lake is expected to be "Panther Lake," while the successor to Arrow Lake is thought to be called "Nova Lake," although this name hasn't been confirmed by Intel yet.

So what cores will Nova Lake use? Supposedly Nova Lake will be the platform to debut Intel's "Royal Core." Shockingly little is actually known about Royal Core at this point. However, leakers and rumor-mongers have said quite a bit about it, including that Royal Core will apparently mark the inception of Intel's "Renting Units," the foundation for what it described in a patent as "Partitioned Thread Scheduling." We wrote about that at length last year, if you'd like to read it; it's quite relevant.


The short version is that Royal Core supposedly has the ability to split program threads into partitions that can then be sent to different physical processor cores for parallel execution. According to leakers, this capability wasn't going to appear in the first version coming with Nova Lake, but instead it was going to arrive with the second iteration of Royal Core in "Beast Lake."


So what is Cobra Core, then? We don't know yet, but we know that it's real because an Intel employee posting on LinkedIn (spotted by the Korean enthusiasts at Gamma0burst) writes that he was working on "Royal/Cobra Core" during his time at Intel. According to the LinkedIn posts, the intention of the Royal/Cobra Core projects was "to create and execute a new architecture for Intel x86 processors with more power efficiency and high performance compared to the other competitors in the market." Well, fair enough.

Most of the information out there about the Royal Core project at Intel originates from YouTuber "Moore's Law Is Dead." In the words of Gamma0burst, "MLID is often wrong, so his reliability is low to the point that people often reject his statements out of hand. Personally, when I look at [MLID's leaks], I sometimes think that it is just a patchwork of rumors that are going around. The so-called tipsters are not all like that, but it seems difficult to trust his information because he has not mentioned Cobra Core so far."


MLID has definitely posted real leaks in the past, but he is also known to present spurious information as gospel. Perhaps most frustratingly, MLID has recently claimed that Beast Lake and its successor, using the full "Royal Core 2.0" design supposedly envisioned by Jim Keller himself, has been canceled by Pat Gelsinger citing a focus on CPU power efficiency. Hopefully someone else shares some information about Royal Core and/or Cobra Core before long, as we're terribly curious about the technology.