Intel's roadmap is a little confusing, at least for those of us looking in from the outside. There are so many lakes, you'd be forgiven for thinking we're looking at a map of Canada. The latest details concern Intel's Lunar Lake architecture, which is tentatively planned for release in late 2024 or early 2025.
Lunar Lake is believed to be a mobile oriented architecture, with a focus on low power consumption and performance per watt. It's expected to follow Meteor Lake, or co-exist with it if Intel splits its mobile chips into two broad performance tiers.
On the desktop side, we can expect Raptor Lake refresh CPUs later in 2023, followed by Arrow Lake chips later in 2024. There's a lot of lakes there to swim through, but if we separate the mobile and desktop architectures, it makes drowning easier to avoid.
According to reporting from Moore's Law is Dead and @SquashBionic (via Notebook Check) Lunar Lake will contain up to four Lion Cove P cores and 4 Skymont E cores. That might look a little underwhelming as far as multithreading performance goes, but bear in mind we're likely looking at 15W U class CPUs here. The i7 1365U is Intel's top end Raptor Lake U processor and it only has two performance cores (though it has eight E cores), so in many workloads, the higher P core count will be beneficial.
MLID mentions the possibility that these P cores could lack hyperthreading. I'm skeptical on that point. Traditionally, a 4C/4T implementation is preferable to 2C/4T, though 4C/8T would be even better.
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