Intel Arrow Lake-H CPUs For Laptops To Feature Core Architecture Trio: Lion Cove P-Cores, Skymont E-Cores, Crestmont LP-E Cores

Intel's Arrow Lake-H CPUs are now confirmed to include three different core architectures, Lion Cove P, Skymont E & Crestmont LP-E cores.

Intel is preparing to launch its desktop Arrow Lake-S "Core Ultra 200" CPUs in October but it will follow with the mobile variants close to CES 2025 since the family scales from desktops to mobile platforms. As we get closer to the launch of these CPUs, Intel is making preparations for the new lineup. Recent Linux PMU patches for Arrow Lake CPUs reveal new information about the mobile lineup, specifically the Arrow Lake-H variant as follows:

ArrowLake-H is a specific variant of regular ArrowLake. It shares same PMU features on lioncove P-cores and skymont E-cores with regular ArrowLake except ArrowLake-H adds extra crestmont uarch E-cores.

Thus ArrowLake-H contains two different atom uarchs. This is totally different with previous Intel hybrid platforms which contains only one kind of atom uarchs. In this case, it's not enough to distinguish the uarchs just by core type. So CPUID.1AH.EAX[23:0] provides an unique native model ID for each uarch, this unique native model ID combining the core type can be used to uniquely identity the uarch.

This patch series introduces PMU support for ArrowLake-H. Besides inheriting the same PMU support from regular ArrowLake, it leverages the native model ID to detect the 2nd kind of atom uarch core and enables PMU support. To distinguish the two atom uarchs in sysfs, the PMU of 2nd atom uarch is named to "cpu_atom2".

via Kernel.org

The patch indicates that the Arrow Lake-H CPUs are going to have a mix of Skymont and Crestmont architectures for its Efficient cores, unlike the previous-gen Alder, Raptor, and Raptor Lake refresh chips, where you would usually see only one type of Efficient cores. With Meteor Lake, we did see Intel utilize LP-E cores but those were based on the same E-Core architecture whereas the Arrow Lake-H CPUs will deploy different E-core architectures for different purposes. The Skymont E-Cores will sit alongside the Lion Cove P-Cores on the main compute tile while the Crestmont LP-E cores will be featured on the SOC tile. The information confirms previous reports from a year back.

Keep in mind that Arrow Lake-H isn't the only lineup for Arrow Lake mobile chips. We also have the Arrow Lake HX & Arrow Lake U for high-performance and power-efficient laptops respectively. The Arrow Lake H series is built for mainstream gaming notebooks, featuring up to 6 Lion Cove P-cores and 8 Skymont E-cores. There will also be 2 Crestmont LP-E cores. At the moment, the code is under review but once it's ready, it could be merged with Linux Kernel v6.12. The HX chips will be configured like the desktop SKUs with 8 P-Cores and 16 E-Cores while the U-series will feature just 2 P-Cores and 6/8 E-cores.

Intel Arrow Lake-H CPUs will have a naming scheme of Core Ultra 200H and will also provide Xe-LPG integrated graphics but will mainly be paired with discrete GPU solutions for higher gaming performance. Before the launch of Arrow Lake-based laptops, the mobile market will see Lunar Lake chips, which will be the first to launch in the market, even before the desktop Arrow Lake-S series. Expect the laptops to be equipped with NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 50 "Blackwell" laptop GPUs.

News Source: Phoronix