Recently, Intel Corporation has recently made a series of strategic adjustments to its processor product line. According to reports, Intel plans to cancel the release of the Arrow Lake-S Refresh series of processors and will launch a new CPU family after the Nova Lake-S, codenamed Razer Lake. The Arrow Lake-S Refresh was originally expected to launch in late 2025 to early 2026, but has now been cancelled. Intel's mainstream desktop family (MSDT) will skip this generation on LGA1851 platforms and launch the Razer Lake-S (RZL-S CPU for short) on the next platform.
Nova Lake-S is expected to launch in 2026 as the successor to Arrow Lake-S, while Razer Lake is expected to launch after Nova Lake-S. It's unclear if these new CPU series will continue to be compatible with the LGA 1851 socket, but the industry is generally looking forward to it, as it will provide investors with a longer product life for the upcoming new platform.
These new CPU families from Intel, including Arrow Lake, Nova Lake, and Razer Lake, are expected to differ significantly from Intel's 12th, 13th, and 14th Gen CPUs in several ways, potentially bringing a new generation of interfaces or chipsets to support new features.
Figure: Intel chip (Source: Intel)
In addition, Intel is actively working on the RoyalCore and CobraCore microarchitectures, which will be a major change in the Naming Habits of Cove Core, which has been followed since the 12th generation of the Alder Lake series. RoyalCore is expected to debut on the Nova Lake platform in 2026, while CobraCore plans to reintroduce hyper-threading on top of this, supporting four threads per core.
Royal Core is a next-generation microarchitecture that Intel plans to launch on the Nova Lake platform. It represents a major shift since the 12th generation of the Alder Lake series, moving away from the "Cove" naming system and heralding a possible new naming convention for Intel. Royal Core expects to ditch Hyper-Threading and focus on improving single-core performance and efficiency to achieve higher instruction cycle (IPC) growth. Rumor has it that Intel may replace hyper-threading technology with "rentable units" and allocate tasks to performance cores (P-cores) and efficiency cores (E-cores) more granularly to optimize resource utilization and improve overall processing efficiency.
As the successor to the Royal Core, the Cobra Core is expected to launch after the Royal Core. Unlike Royal Core, Cobra Core will reintroduce hyper-threading technology, but each core will support four threads, using Intel's Beast Core design, which may result in a significant increase in multi-threading processing power. The specific timeline for the adoption of Cobra Core has not yet been clarified, but it is expected to be available in 2027 or later.
Intel's changes herald a major effort in microarchitecture to improve the single-core capabilities of architectures, especially in high-performance computing tasks. At the same time, it also shows how Intel is maintaining its leading position in the industry through technological innovation in the face of pressure from competitors such as AMD.
