Intel reportedly dismantles Jim Keller's revolutionary Royal Core project and cancels Beast Lake
Anyone following the development of Intel’s CPU architectures over the past few years knows that the Royal Core project was supposed to be the savior that would push Intel ahead of the pack, especially compared to Apple’s M-series SoCs. However, Royal Core may not be coming along as well as Intel might have hoped according to the latest leak from Moore’s Law Is Dead.
As a small refresher, Intel’s Royal Core project was headed by Jim Keller, the man behind AMD’s breakout Zen architecture that finally allowed the company to take Intel head-on. The project was reportedly exploring technologies like Rentable Units, 4-way Hyperthreading, and, among other things, CPU tiles that could work like P and E cores when needed.
In short, the Royal Core project was to be Intel’s Zen moment and Beast Lake architecture was supposed to be the first full implementation of the project.
But, as if to worsen Intel’s plight, it appears Team Blue has canceled Beast Lake and is dismantling Royal Core into different projects.
Intel Beast Lake canceled
According to MLID, Intel's Beast Lake architecture has been canned. The architecture was supposed to bring a massive single-core performance improvement through four “Extra Big” cores and was expected to combine up to 32 E-cores in the flagship 36-core variant.
Since Beast Lake which, per MLID, was to be the full implementation of Royal Core is now seemingly canceled, Intel is allegedly taking various Royal Core technologies like Rentable Units and spinning them up into new projects for future CPU architectures.
To put it simply, we may not see a single Intel CPU architecture that utilizes all the new stuff from Royal Core. Instead, we could see future architecture like Nova Lake implement some technologies from Royal Core and so on.
Naturally, since Intel is focused on Arrow Lake for desktop and Lunar Lake for mobile, the company hasn’t announced details regarding Beast Lake and beyond. So, until we see what Team Blue has in store for the future, take MLID’s report with skepticism.
Source(s)
Moore's Law Is Dead on YouTube, Teaser image: Ryan on Unsplash, Intel (edited)
