Intel's HYPER THREADING REMOVAL: Lunar Lake's influence on Arrow Lake explained

Intel's new mobile CPUs, codenamed Lunar Lake, aka the Core Ultra Series 2 is about to land on laptops and it looks pretty awesome. Huge gains in power efficiency, battery life, CPU, GPU and AI performance even compared to Meteor Lake. A huge leap for anyone upgrading from something older.

However, thanks to a common hybrid core architecture, mobile-focussed Lunar Lake has had a huge impact on the design of future desktop processors too including Arrow Lake - Intel's replacement for the 14th Gen CPUs.

In this video we chat to Intel's David Feng about Lunar Lake, the Evo standard and why Intel was so sure the removal of hyper threading - a 20-year old performance-boosting feature - was the right move.

Thanks to @Intel for providing the opportunity and to @ASUS, @MSI and @Dell for their hands-on experiences that aided this video.

Timestamps
0:00 intro
1:17 What is hyper-threading?
4:30 What benefits does Lunar Lake if you have an old laptop?
6:28 Lunar Lake's gaming performance
7:00 Should you upgrade from a Meteor Lake Core Ultra Series 1 laptop?
8:46 Why is Lunar Lake launching so soon after Meteor Lake?
10:10 What's the difference between Meteor Lake and Lunar Lake?
11:31 What's new with Intel Evo?
15:32 Why is Intel removing hyper threading?

#lunarlake #dellxps #bestlaptop #intel #arrowlake #pchardware

[patrickprafke]

The 2 big reasons for this single core thing.

1. E core and P core is having trouble talking to each other. And as a single thread it behaves "better".

2. They are more stable at higher frequency with a single thread. Because, Marketing.

[rozzbourn]

i am also on my 9900k that has been overclocked to 5.0ghz for nearly 6 years now. it still gets the job done. dropping hyperthreading makes sense to me, because they could just add more of the e-cores that are rumored to be as powerful as raptor lake. i can also see the ai portion of the cpu being utilized with the direction that tech is going. it would be one of those "i would rather have it and not need it, than need it and not have it" things. if the performance of arrow lake or zen5 x3d blows my socks off, i may upgrade.

[CrazyTechLab]

TIMESTAMPS BELOW!

Thanks to @Intel for providing the opportunity and to @ASUS, @MSI and @Dell for their hands-on experiences that aided this video.






Timestamps
0:00 intro
1:17 What is hyper-threading?
4:30 What benefits does Lunar Lake if you have an old laptop?
6:28 Lunar Lake's gaming performance
7:00 Should you upgrade from a Meteor Lake Core Ultra Series 1 laptop?
8:46 Why is Lunar Lake launching so soon after Meteor Lake?
10:10 What's the difference between Meteor Lake and Lunar Lake?
11:31 What's new with Intel Evo?
15:32 Why is Intel removing hyper threading?

[MnemonicCarrier]

Lunar Lake looks very interesting. I'm purely a Linux user, and have been on AMD for about 5 years now (and have been very happy with AMD, have had laptops with Ryzen 7 4800H, Ryzen 7 6800H, Ryzen 7 8840U and one with a Ryzen 7 5850U). If the MacBooks with the M series chips were more "open" and Linux friendly, I would have purchased one in a heartbeat (great performance while sipping battery power). Really hoping Lunar Lake lives up to the hype.

[sangjela]

serious and good article.
I will buy some more intel stock...
and new desktop (may be first of year 2025, I thinks).
I have may notebook but my desktop too old, that 17% over clocked.6700K

[maxheadrom]

I watched, by chance, a lecture about wasted processing power due to optimizations like hyperthreading. Did not understand it very well but I'll link the lecture here.


The short of it: there's the von Neuman bottleneck (DRAM is much slower than CPU) and things like multithreading and prefetching were created. Researchers - like the lecturer on that video - have shown all this adds nothing in term of computational power. All they do is waste electricity and silcone area.

BTW, the lecturer is talking about Servers and, you know, that's the big market. We're just beta testers.

EDIT: the lecture is from C++Now 2024. Energy efficiency has nothing to do with laptops - it's all about servers. We, of course, love that. Intel deserves applauses for how efficient they've done their CPUs and deserves a stern talk for how long they took to make it.

[piotrd.]

I kinda understand removal of multithreadng from High Performance cores, removal of IPC penalty and sync issues. But E-cores? Stupid. If something is easily parallelizable (faq, what a word) even e-cores can contribute. If not, they will be able to handle many more lightweight / occassionally acting backgroudn processes.

[ParetoEmperor-jpke]

i stop using Intel since 2021 because of lack of threads, lack of cores and stucked in milimeters

[tibbydudeza]

They were working on royal core project (Jim Keller) which uses rentable core idea … a p core can become multiple e cores if required

Panther Lake might see this come into fruition but recent cost cuts might impact this

[phillipsusi]

About time. Hyperthreading only made sense when you only had one or two cores. In that case if you had 3 or 4 or 5 threads that wanted to run, you could get a little more work done with a few "half cores" that could do something while the other half was momentarily stalled. These days, you still typically only have 3 or 4 or 5 threads, but 6 or 8 or 12 cores, so there's just no need for those half cores thrown in the mix.

[dustinjenkins]

Dropping hyperthreading makes sense if you dont have the manpower and resources to design both laptop and desktop chips. It makes no sense if you're trying to make powerful industry leading desktop chips.

[HyprSonX]

I smell some marketing bs in certain answers.

“Crap, we couldn’t get Hyperthreading to work in this crappy new CPU… let’s tell people this was planned and is actually a good thing!”

Remember kids - Intel knew their 8th Gen CPUs were all affected by the Spectre/Meltdown Hardware bugs, yet they still chose to sell them anyway.

Intel is NOT acting in favor of their customers! I wouldn’t be shocked if in a few years reports surface that this Lunar Lake was actually an unfinished prototype Gen, that Intel had to rush to not loose market share to Qualcomms Elite CPUs and AMDs power efficient CPUs.

[f.]

what will happen with older games? might they run better with disabled HT? i remember with my old ivy bridge cpu, where disablind HT lowered the performance in games

[abaj]

Explains why they have such poor multi-threaded performance.

[mikaelheinola]

IMO Hyper threading was removed because memory access is so fast that there is no time to run (hyper) multiple threads in one cpu. Its a logical step for more efficient instruction execution.

[SidneyCritic]

Who was it recently that turned off HT and found hardly any difference in power consumption - lol -.

[ericshutter]

Intel might be gone in 2-3 years ... how odd...

[ItsAkile]

I understand dropping HT on mobile 100%, On Arrow Lake sure its just 8 cores HT but that made up a lot of the MT perf. I personally don't care too much about efficiency as long as its not absard and dangerous/annoying for coolers to tame. dropping HT will hurt their gains but it'll help normalize what was becoming a meme, I hope Arrow OLake has some head room for me to get at least an extra 100-300mhz mentaining at least 5.8ghz on the P-cores. I'm also super curious to see how the E-cores scales with power.

[johndoh]

Never say "forever". Intel could release a CPU geared towards WS or server and they need to boost core counts a LOT AND run p cores and they would once again have to maximize die space which is why HT or SMT-2 came about in the first place.

[moonwatcher]

"they are not always doing that" implies that they may still be doing that a lot of the times ;)