It’s been a complicated quarter, and now comes the difficult exercise of announcing results, and Intel’s current CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, speaks about the company’s future actions. He seems to have high hopes for the company, and especially for Nova Lake. If Arrow Lake disappoints, according to him, the future Blue architecture will enable the company to catch up with AMD. To achieve this, the company is not hesitating to pull out all the stops, as we shall see!
Nova Lake, Intel’s Wunderwaffe against AMD’s machine ?
Clearly, Arrow Lake is disappointing, and the Blues know it. To make up for this, Intel is betting on Nova Lake, which will offer architectural improvements, that’s for sure. For the time being, Arrow Lake can be seen as an outline of what the company wants to do.
With its next generation, the company confirms that the 18A process will be at the heart of the matter, and that it will perhaps be an optimized version. In the meantime, processors will feature a clearly increased number of cores. The largest processors will adopt up to 52 cores! Of course, these won’t be P-Core-only chips, but hybrid CPUs mixing P-Core and E-Core.
As for the iGPU, we’re likely to see a new architecture with Celestial, perhaps, or something else… stay tuned.
In any case, the company clearly has work to do, as AMD is currently enjoying a good image, particularly boosted by its X3D processors. But we’ll have to wait and see, since this new generation (which will save Intel?) is not expected until the end of 2026.
The future?
In the future, the CEO has clearly indicated that he wants to reactivate SMT (hyperthreading) on these processors, particularly in the server domain. Clearly, its deactivation was a mistake, one that the company wants to correct. However, don’t expect to see hyperthreaded CPUs just yet, as Coral Rapids CPUs are said to be coming back in 2028 and/or 2029.
At the same time, the CEO points out that the discontinuation of SMT is a serious error that is currently costing the company valuable market share.
In the meantime, the company will be launching its next generation of Panther Lake mobile processors, all engraved in 18A, the famous process that has unfortunately failed to find takers despite solid promises. This 18A process will be used in three generations of CPUs for consumer and server applications. After that, there’s talk of the 14A taking over, with the aim of competing with TSMC’s A14 again in 2028/2029.
In short, it’s hard to be perfectly enthusiastic about the company’s future. Indeed, between massive lay-off plans (workforce reduced to 75,000 employees) and disappointing CPU generations, we prefer to be cautious on this subject.
