Intel is eliminating hyperthreading on its latest Lunar Lake processors. The concurrent multithreading technology, which has steadily provided 2 threads per core for decades, has been removed from the Lunar Lake processor to favor more power-efficient P-cores and rely on E-cores for multithreading performance, as previous rumors had suggested.

"We actually decided not to use hyperthreading because we can scale using E-cores," says arik Gihon of intel. This is said to be a "good trade-off" because Skymont E-core is effective for multi-core performance. Lunar Lake has 4 E-cores placed on a new computational tile with a low power island complex, which will be preferred first by thread Director and os.

Intel argues that using a hybrid architecture that uses Thread Director, namely Lunar Lake, Meteor Lake, and the desktop chip post—Alder Lake, prioritizes the physical core over threads and reduces the need for hyperthreading.

"Our E-cores are getting very good and can provide better hyperthreading performance than SMT, without hyperthreading," said Intel's Robert Hallock.

"We're getting far more from these cores."

Many of the applications that are frequently used in thin and light laptops, Intel claims, utilize four threads or less.

This is an interesting take, but most of all, we've seen the opposite argument being debated over the years to increase the number of threads. While Intel is not talking about games or intensive applications that are best suited for desktops or performance-focused chips, Lunar Lake is all about efficiency.Although there are also rumors of Arrow Lake desktop chips without hyperthreading.

Lion Cove p cores are reportedly tuned to single-threaded efficiency without hyperthreading, meaning approximately 5% performance/power and 15% performance/power/area gain relative to cores with hyperthreading enabled. However, performance/area has decreased by about 15%.

"Remember that hyperthreading is not free," says Ori Lempel, senior principal engineer at Intel's latest P-core

. It adds mediation points along the pipeline. It requires various furnace mechanisms and even dedicated security hardware."This is a trade-off, and what Intel is willing to make for Lunar Lake and low-power laptop chips," he said. That said, Intel has a better idea of the benefits than we do. While Lunar Lake's actual battery benchmarks are not yet shared, we're just mentioning that Lunar Lake is running SoC power up to 40% lower than Meteor Lake.

How Lunar Lake is formed between multithreaded performance and Meteor Lake will be the key to these claims. And whether that performance is justified by a much extended battery life. What's more, how it stacks up on qualcomm's new ARM-based chip is probably the larger battery. That's certainly what Intel is worried about more than anything else.