Senior Intel Engineer Explains the Radical Shift in CPU Design

When Intel launched Lunar Lake (Core Ultra 200V) in 2024 we gave you the technical details and followed up with a review of the Asus Zenbook S 14 which has incredible battery life. In the following month we discussed Intel Arrow Lake (Core Ultra 200S) and how we considered it was unfit for review in a situation that was not resolved until February 2025. On the one hand we have Lunar Lake which we like, while on the other hand we have Arrow Lake which is troubled, yet both families of processors run on Lion Cove P-cores and Skymont E-cores and have a huge amount in common. Another point which we mentioned in our reviews but didn't cover in much depth is that Lion Cove ditches SMT or Hyper-Threading which has been a feature since Pentium 4 in 2002. We are familiar with an eight-core CPU with 16 threads but we now have to get used to the idea of 8P+16E=24T. We figured the best way to understand this significant change was to ask, Ori Lempel, the leader of the team that designed Lion Cove.