Intel recently revealed insights about its upcoming Panther Lake CPU architecture, which appears to be an incremental advance over prior designs, promising to be constructed on a new process node—18A. The lead x86 CPU architect at Intel, Stephen Robinson, articulated why certain CPU core designs were selected during an interview with George Cozma from Chips and Cheese.

Robinson maintained that simultaneous multithreading (SMT) was less crucial within hybrid architectures, indicating that with hybrid cores, scheduling for tasks predominantly involves allocating workloads to either Performance Cores (P-Cores) or Efficiency Cores (E-Cores) effectively.

As hybrid designs have become mainstream, with their introduction starting from the 12th Generation Alder Lake CPUs, Intel has dropped SMT in its latest architectures, including Lunar Lake mobile and Alder Lake desktop chips. According to Robinson, hybrid systems do not experience a significant loss in performance due to the absence of SMT.

He remarked, “We didn’t lose a lot in clients because of hybrid and the core count, but we gained a bit in our design and execution.” This shift alleviates the silicon occupied by SMT, which translates into smaller chip sizes, reduced power consumption, and improved frequency targets.

Robinson’s insights suggest that Intel is confident in its architectural decisions as it moves forward with Panther Lake, aiming for higher efficiency and performance without the complexities introduced by SMT.