Intel Slide Confirms Nova Lake S/U, Wildcat Lake And All P-Core Bartlett Lake Roadmap
For a long time, the play when you need critical real-time performance has been to set up a specialized embedded system for that task, meaning you need a whole other system for general-purpose computing. Intel wants its customers to know that its hardware and software support for "Time Coordinated Computing" means you can do it all on one chip. To that end, it released a slide deck on the topic, but as it happens, said deck turned out to include codenames for unreleased and unconfirmed products.
Naturally, Intel has pulled the deck, but of course, folks screenshotted it and have shared it online. The salient slide is essentially a list of products on offer that support Time Coordinated Computing, and on the left, it lists a variety of current- and previous-generation parts from the Xeon, Core, and Atom lines. Over on the right, it lists "In Development" products, and while it's no surprise to see Bartlett Lake-S and Panther Lake there, this is to our knowledge the first official source corroborating Nova Lake, Wildcat Lake, and Twin Lake, as well as the 12-core version of Bartlett Lake.
Time Coordinated Computing is of course the domain of Intel's Networking and Edge (NEX) division; being that this division focuses exclusively on B2B sales, it focuses on proven hardware and platforms. That's why Intel's latest-generation Arrow Lake processors don't appear at all; NEX isn't planning to use Arrow Lake. That division's actually behind the creation of the Bartlett Lake processors to begin with, and most of that family is already available. However, the long-rumored LGA 1700 CPUs with twelve Raptor Lake P-cores haven't materialized yet, and many wondered if they were real at all. Now we know: yes.
Nova Lake is the codename for the successor to Arrow Lake on both desktop and mobile platforms, although it's seeming like we're going to get a refresh of Arrow Lake before we see Nova. Panther Lake then, is a family of smaller mobile processors that could be considered the successor to Intel's well-liked Lunar Lake mobile processors. Finally, Wildcat Lake is an interesting low-power kitten that seems like it will be branded "Core" based on today's leak despite that it seems more similar to the Intel "N" series low-power processors. Oh, and Twin Lake is the codename for the extant Alder Lake-N refresh.
If you're keen to snag a Bartlett Lake processor with twelve P-cores and no E-cores as an upgrade for your aging LGA 1700 rig, you may want to hold your horses. Besides the fact that "Bartlett Lake-S 12P" is likely to be lower-clocked and thus lower-performing compared to a consumer Raptor Lake Core i9, unrepentant serial leaker Moore's Law is Dead claims that the new processors are still affected by the Vmin Shift Instability issue that plagues high-end Raptor Lake processors. We wouldn't have expected that to be the case given that it's a recently-modified hardware design, but only time will tell.
