Intel is ditching Hyper-Threading with its latest Lunar Lake processors. The simultaneous multithreading technology that has steadily delivered two threads per core for decades is being removed from itsin favour of more power efficient P-cores and relying more on E-cores for multithreaded performance, as previous rumours had suggested.
Intel argues that a hybrid architecture using Thread Director—i.e. Lunar Lake, Meteor Lake, and any desktop chip post-Alder Lake—will prioritise physical cores over threads, which reduces the need for Hyper-threading. The Lion Cove P-cores are reportedly tuned for single-thread efficiency without Hyper-Threading, which means a gain of around 5% performance/power and 15% performance/power/area versus the core with Hyper-Threading enabled. However, there is a reduction in performance/area of around 15%.
How Lunar Lake shapes up in multithreaded performance versus Meteor Lake will be key to these claims. And whether that performance is justified by much extended battery life. Furthermore, how it stacks up to Qualcomm's new ARM-based chips, which are supposedly big on battery. That's surely what Intel is worrying about most of all.