Intel's "clearwater Forest" Xeon 7 E-Core CPU Will Be a Beast

The evolution of the Atom cores has been continuous in the series ... Silvermont, Airmont, Goldmont, Golmont Plus, Tremont (also included as E-core inside Intel Lakefield), Gracemont (from Alder Lake/Raptor Lake/Alder Lake N/Amston Lake), Crestmont (from Meteor Lake/Sierra Forest), Skymont (Lunar Lake/Arrow Lake), Darkmont (Clearwater Forest).

All the cores of this series have been designed in succession by the same team and the improvements between them have been incremental. These cores have always been intended as competitors for various Arm Cortex-A cores, e.g. Goldmont Plus for Cortex-A75, Tremont for Cortex-A76, Gracemont for Cortex-A78, and now Darkmont/Skymont for Neoverse V3/Cortex-X4.

Before Tremont, these Atom cores were used only in homogeneous CPUs. In recent years only those sold for industrial applications have retained the brand "Atom". The most recent CPUs branded as "Atom" have been launched last year.

For now, it does not matter whether one refers to any of these cores as "Atom" cores or as "E-cores", because either name refers unambiguously to the same cores. "Atom" seems preferable, because it is more clearly Intel-specific. One could refer as "efficient cores" to cores in CPUs made by others.

The first E-cores were the Tremont cores of Intel Lakefield, which was launched in Q2 2020, which were paired with Ice Lake cores, and which had a performance much less than Skylake cores. Only the next generation of Atom cores a.k.a. E-cores, Gracemont, has reached performances comparable with Skylake. While Gracemont was first launched in Alder Lake, later it has become widely available in Atom-branded CPUs.

Anyway as you note these are excellent cores, and having 576 slightly wimpy cores in a box is an idea worth considering.

- I've delid the processor and now it doesn't work. Can I have it replaced under warranty?

- dead tone

It's two B60 GPUs on a single x16 PCIe card. Nothing unified.

Instead of that, there will be a cut down variant of Panther Lake, named Wildcat Lake, with 2 P-cores and 4 E-cores.

That will clearly have a much better performance than N150, including a much better Xe3 GPU, but it seems very unlikely that Intel will sell it at the low prices that made the N-series so attractive.

I assume that Wildcat Lake will be priced similarly to N350, so it will be available in computers closer in price to $300 than to the $100 that can get you an N100 or N150 computer.

[1]: https://chipsandcheese.com/p/skymont-intels-e-cores-reach-fo...

erp. 8x. math hard.