Intel's future CPU architecture is revealed to be returning to a unified architecture

On the Alder Lake architecture 12th generation Core released in 2021, Intel officially introduced two architectures, P performance core and E performance core, into the x86 architecture. However, future CPU architectures will return to unity and no longer distinguish between P and E cores. Judging from the recruitment page on LinkedIn,The Unified Core team is mentioned in Intel’s recruitment of senior CPU verification engineers.The engineer recruited is very demanding and the salary is very good. The annual salary is between 140,000 and 270,000 US dollars.

This recruitment also triggered speculation about Intel’s future CPU architecture.The TPU website believes that this means that Intel will unify the CPU architecture and no longer distinguish between P and E cores.

However, it is not 100% certain whether this guess is accurate. Anyway, Nova Lake from this year to next year will not only have P+E cores, but also LPE ultra-low power cores. The subsequent rumored Razer Lake will also be a combination of P+E+LPE. The CPU specifications of Titan Lake and Serpent Lake in the future are not yet known, but GPUs will gradually turn to NVIDIA's GPU core integration.

Therefore, even if Intel really unifies the CPU cores in the future and no longer distinguishes between P core and E core, I am afraid it will only be a few years later, and it will not be seen until around 2030.

Looking back at the P+E core over the past few years, its performance has been mixed. The advantage is of course that it has greatly increased the number of CPU cores. Nowadays, mainstream CPUs with more than ten or twenty cores are common. Nova Lake can even achieve 52 cores. The three-digit hundred-core war is not far away.

However, the mixing of two different architectures has also brought a lot of troubles, especially CPU scheduling. Now it cannot be said that this problem has been perfectly solved, which will lead to problems in actual use. It has even caused mainstream CPUs to abandon AVX-512 instructions. This is essentially a separation caused by the differences in the design and use of the two cores.

Therefore, Intel's strategy has also changed in the past two years. At least on the server version of Xeon CPU, there are more products with either all P cores or all E cores, which avoids these complex problems.