[Hardware] Intel Meteor Lake CPU’s Redwood Cove P-Cores Use Similar Architecture As Golden Cove, New Architecture For E-Cores

[ROVEN]

 

New information regarding Intel's 14th Gen Meteor Lake CPUs has been revealed in the company's Open Source database by Coelacanth-Dream. As per the details, it looks like Meteor Lake CPUs will be a refinement of the existing Golden Cove cores while featuring a brand new architecture for the E-Cores.

Intel 14th Gen Meteor Lake CPUs: Redwood Cove P-Cores With Same Architecture & Tweaks, Crestmont E-Cores With New Architecture

The details reveal that Intel's 14th Gen Meteor Lake CPUs will once again utilize a hybrid approach which shouldn't be a surprise by now. The Native Model ID for each hybrid CPU family has been listed, starting with the Lakefield which has 0x0 "Core" and "0x0" Atom family. Lakefield SOC was Intel's first design based on a hybrid architecture approach. Since then, Intel has launched its 12th Gen Alder Lake and will soon be launching the upcoming 13th Gen Raptor Lake CPUs.

 

The Intel 12th Gen Alder Lake CPUs feature the 0x0 "Core" also known as the Golden Cove P-Core and 0x1 "Atom" also known as the Gracemont E-Core. Intel's 13th Gen Raptor Lake CPUs will retain this design, however, due to various changes made on a core level (not to be mistaken with Uarch), the company has decided to rename its P-Cores to Raptor Cove. We have seen some changes such as cache bump, and clock bump but those are hardly any architectural uplifts.

 

Now coming to 14th Gen Meteor Lake CPUs, the Redwood Cove P-Cores are once again expected to be based on the 0x1 "Core" design which means that while there will be Core-level upgrades, the architecture will more or less remain the same. On the other hand, the "Atom" E-Cores known as Crestmont, will be upgraded to 0x2 Native Model.

 

OneRaichu explains that Redwood Cove will not widen the architecture as much as Sunny Cove cores and will mainly focus on instruction execution efficiency. It can be regarded as 0x1.5 since there are talks of improvements to branch prediction, micro-operation fusion, instruction dispatch, register remake, and EU execution efficiency. While Intel Meteor Lake CPUs utilize the brand new "Intel 4" process node, the node may not be as mature as 10ESF and we can see a clock regression that will be unable to match the high frequencies that Raptor Lake has to offer.

Meanwhile, the IPC will be better than Raptor Lake but single-threaded performance won't see a huge gain. Previous rumors had already hinted that Meteor Lake will offer single-digit IPC gains vs Raptor Lake but those will be enough to keep AMD CPUs at bay for a while until Arrow Lake comes out in 2024.