Designing a processor is not easy, it takes years to create new processors and adapt them to the most advanced nodes. Now, we learn that Intel is working on a new architecture, presented as quite interesting. Specifically, Intel works in the Cobra Core x86 Architecture which focuses on future processors offering increased performance and efficiency.
The company has been making various tweaks and changes to its designs for some time to stay ahead of the curve. One of the most notable is moving away from monolithic design to designing hybrid processors that combine different types of cores.
The latest innovation or rather in its chips has been the inclusion of the famous NPU. This is a kind of independent core intended exclusively to perform tasks for AI. A few cores that, for the moment, would only be used by Microsoft Copilot+.
Intel working on Cobra Core architecture
As you well know, the company’s current processors combine power and efficiency. But this is temporary, because after the 14th generation of chips, the company began to use a tiled design (chiplets). Meteor Lake is the first processor family with this design.
This mosaic design will be used in the Lunar Lake, Arrow Lake and Panther Lake. These will be the solutions that will mark a shift to the new architecture called Royal Cove. The full implementation of this design will be implemented in Nova Lake, intended for laptops and desktops, which will hit the market between 2026 and 2027.
There are rumors that Jim Keller, before joining Tenstorrent, had two architectural designs ready. The first one would be Royal Cove, while the other one would be Ocean Cove. The first data about Ocean Cove was published in 2018 and we don’t know much else about it. So it is assumed that it could have been the codename of the previous generation architecture. Royal Cove would therefore be the successor.
It seems that the x86 architecture that would replace Ocean Cove would be Cobra Cove. What this new architecture would seek is to achieve greater efficiency and performance compared to other competitors.
A leak from “gamma0burst” shows a roadmap based on rumors and profiles used. According to thisPanther Lakewhich is the sequel to Arrow Lake, would use P-Nucleus design Cougar Cove And Electronic cores of Dark Mountain. Nova Lake will replace the Panther Lake and would be based on P-Nucleus design Panther Cove And Electronic cores design Arctic wolf.
So Cobra Core is the name of the general architecture of Nova Lake and some later families. Then this family is divided into power and efficiency core designs, which are always given different names to easily differentiate them.
According to the leak, the first family of processors based on the Cobra Core architecture will be manufactured on the 18A process. It should be noted that this process is said to be superior to TSMC’s 2nm node, once again placing the company at the forefront of chip design and manufacturing.
