Arrow Lake-S CPU sample with 24 cores, no hyperthreading and no AVX512 support pops up in Intel testing database

Ever since the introduction of the hybrid architecture that combines performance cores with efficiency cores, Intel has been hinting that hyperthreading could be phased out and possibly replaced by a new form of multithreading at some point. The latest Meteor Lake mobile processors also integrate LP-cores, which are a special kind of efficiency cores integrated directly in the SoC die, and these too have no hyperthreading support. From the recently leaked spec sheets for the upcoming Arrow Lake-S CPU, we learned that even the performance cores could soon ditch the hyperthreading support, but, if that was not clear enough, new evidence has been uncovered in Intel’s own testing database.

InstLatX64 yesterday tweeted that an Arrow Lake-S CPU with 24 threads was identified in recent tests recorded on the Intel GFX CI platform that ensures the Xe graphics drivers work on the latest Linux kernel. The Arrow Lake-S CPUs are expected to feature at most 8 P-cores + 16 E-cores, so it looks like the engineering sample that was recorded in the GFX CI database confirms that hyperthreading is not supported. Moreover, the sample appears to run at 3 GHz, which is only 500 MHz lower than the maximum reported in the spec leak, and is lacking AVX512 instruction support as well.

As with all engineering samples, some specs can be modified until official release, so at least the clocks and instruction support might turn out different on the commercial variants of Intel’s Arrow Lake-S CPUs. It remains to be seen if Intel plans to replace the hyperthreading technology with something superior starting with the Arrow Lake-S processors.

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