Lion Cove: Intel’s P-Core Roars
Intel’s mobile CPUs have undergone massive changes over the past couple generations as Intel defends its laptop market against AMD, Qualcomm, and to a lesser extent Apple. Meteor Lake adopted aggressive chiplet design with separate compute, GPU, SOC, and IO extender tiles. Lunar Lake switches things up again, putting all compute on one tile while a second “platform controller” tile deals strictly with low speed IO.
Amidst this whirlwind of change, Intel’s performance oriented P-Cores have remained a constant. P-Cores aim to deliver maximum per-thread performance, an important metric in client designs where responsiveness is vital and many programs don’t scale across many cores. Lion Cove is Intel’s latest and greatest high performance architecture, and fills the P-Core role in Lunar Lake. While its goals have remained constant, its design has very much not. Compared to Redwood Cove P-Cores in the previous generation Meteor Lake, Lion Cove has been overhauled with both performance and energy efficiency in mind.
We’d like to thank Asus for kindly sampling us with a Zenbook S 14 UX5406SA test system. Without their help, a look at Intel’s latest mobile chip wouldn’t have been possible.
