Intel Nova Lake may restore AVX-512 across P-cores and E-cores

Intel’s Core Ultra Series 4 “Nova Lake” processors are expected to bring AVX-512 back to the company’s client CPU lineup. According to Jay Kihn, the 512-bit SIMD instruction set will be supported on both the “Coyote Cove” P-cores and “Arctic Wolf” E-cores, giving the hybrid architecture a consistent ISA across core types.

That consistency matters because thread migration between P-cores and E-cores can trigger runtime errors if the supported instruction sets do not match. Intel’s last official client Core implementation of AVX-512 appeared in 11th Gen Core “Rocket Lake,” where AVX-512 workloads were associated with overheating on the 14 nm processor. Intel later dropped AVX-512 from client designs largely because E-core generations did not support it.

Intel is expected to provide a client-relevant subset of AVX-512 instructions. AMD added AVX-512 support with “Zen 4” and improved AVX-512 performance with “Zen 5,” while Intel’s return to the instruction set could help client AI inferencing workloads.