Intel Titan Lake Rumored for All P-Cores, Hammer Lake to Return Hyper-Threading

Intel's next-generation desktop platform is apparently going to persist for approximately three and a half full CPU generations if you include the mobile-only Titan Lake. That's just one of the major details released by serial leaker Moore's Law is Dead in a new video that also includes the claims that upcoming Intel CPUs will not only skip E-cores (as we know them) but also that we'll see the return of Intel's Hyper-Threading SMT technology in a few generations.

There's quite a bit to cover here, so let's just go over it chronologically. Intel's next generation of desktop CPUs is codenamed Nova Lake, and it's expected to have models with as many as 52 CPU cores. There was a rumored variant of Nova Lake known as "Nova Lake-AX" that was mooted to be a direct challenge to AMD's Ryzen AI Max ("Strix Halo") CPUs, with a double-wide memory bus and a massive integrated GPU, but it was said more recently to have been canceled.


Well it turns out that, at least according to Tom at infamous YouTube channel Moore's Law is Dead, Nova Lake AX never died, it just got pushed back far enough that it was renamed Razor Lake-AX. You see, a significant portion of the Razor Lake processor family are Nova Lake rebrands, and so it's not as strange as it seems at first; the very same chips meant for Nova Lake-AX will be released along with Razor Lake and called Razor Lake-AX. We've already heard a decent bit about Razor Lake-AX, some of which came from another leaker, Jaykihn.

So Razor Lake is a boring refresh, then? Not quite. Some of the Razor Lake family are reportedly going to be refreshes; mostly, this is the majority of the mobile parts and the lower-end desktop silicon. High-end mobile parts and desktop CPUs (the "HX" and "S" families) will apparently re-use all the Nova Lake parts except for the compute tiles, where they'll get new tiles using revised Griffin Cove P-cores and either "Arctic Wolf+" or possibly "Golden Eagle" E-cores in late 2027 or 2028.

After Razor Lake is Titan Lake, which is apparently not coming to desktop. Titan Lake (abbreviated "TTL") fundamentally seems to come in two major variations, despite there being five variants listed on the slide below. The U, P, and PX versions use an updated compute tile that makes use of "Copper Shark" (CSK) CPU cores, and if you look carefully at the slide, it seems to indicate that the CPUs will make use of "CSK-P" and "CSK-E" cores.


Tom seems to believe that this refers to a design similar to AMD's, where there are standard and dense versions of the same CPU core design on the same chip with identical capabilities but different frequency scaling behavior. He notes that he expects Intel will still call them E-cores out of hubris, but doing so could be a blunder considering what enthusiasts generally think of Intel's E-cores to date.

The other variant of Titan Lake, the "B" and "BX" versions, carry forward CPU tiles from Razor Lake, but they're quite a departure otherwise; both skip any details at all about their GPUs, simply listing "GPU, Medium" for the B design and "GPU, Large" for the BX design. The logical conclusion here is that Titan Lake B and BX will use as-yet-unspecified NVIDIA GPU tiles. The slide also seems to indicate on-package memory for these designs, with the B design using 192-bit LPDDR6 and the BX design marked down for a massive 384-bit LPDDR6 interface. These will not be cheap chips.

Finally, what is arguably the most interesting part of the leak: Intel Hammer Lake and the Thunder Hawk CPU core. According to MLID, Hammer Lake will be a full CPU lineup spanning everything from lightweight laptops to full-power workstations. The chip will utilize the "second gen of Unified Cores," which will reportedly be known as Thunder Hawk. The Youtuber didn't actually share many details about Thunder Hawk, but he did share a snippet that seems to indicate that we'll see at least one compute tile with eight Thunder Hawk P-cores and no other CPU cores.


In fact, according to the leaksman, the majority of the Hammer Lake family is made up entirely of chips sporting a single CPU architecture, just like AMD's designs. That's quite exciting, if it's indeed the case; AMD certainly seems to have proven that enthusiasts want processors without mixed cores.

On the face, it's disappointing that even Hammer Lake seems to stick with DDR5 memory, but remember, all of these parts (Nova Lake, Razor Lake, and Hammer Lake) are going to use the same motherboards. That means the expensive DDR5 CUDIMM kit you bought for your Arrow Lake machine is still going to work in 2029 when Intel releases Hammer Lake. Assuming you didn't overvolt it and burn it up, anyway.