One group appears to be moving toward a greater variety of cores, while the other is preparing to simplify its architectures.
A few weeks ago, the YouTube channel “Moore’s Law is Dead” discussed what could be a true revolution at Intel. The American company is reportedly planning to significantly simplify its processor architectures starting with the Titan Lake generation. Oh, this won’t happen right away, since Titan Lake isn’t expected until, at the earliest, the end of 2028—after Nova Lake and Razor Lake—but it still represents a significant change. Titan Lake would thus no longer rely on a mix of high-performance, efficient, and low-power cores: Intel has reportedly paved the way for what the company’s engineers have dubbed “unified cores.” These cores would still combine different characteristics, but all signs point to the distinction being less pronounced than it is today.
Following the Zen and Zen C cores, AMD could therefore launch Zen LP cores. © AMD
And what about AMD in the meantime? Well, it seems to be heading in the opposite direction. Of course, all of this will need to be verified on a case-by-case basis once the products are actually launched, but while AMD has long remained loyal to a single type of core, Lisa Su’s team seems to be gradually changing course. Remember, with Zen 4, AMD had already introduced Zen 4 cores and Zen 4C cores. The former are designed for the highest performance, while the latter are distinguished by higher density and optimized power consumption. This distinction has been carried over to the Zen 5 and Zen 5C cores.
Everything suggests that not only will this distinction be carried over again for the upcoming generation, Zen 6, but that AMD is also planning to introduce a third type of core: the Zen 6LP. LP stands for “ low power,” and although we still lack details, this appears to be very similar to the low-power cores already used by Intel. According to sources at Wccftech, these cores are indeed designed to operate with minimal power in order to handle secondary tasks or background processes—such as managing sensors to wake up other units.
