Intel has announced a new low-power CPU microarchitecture codenamed Tremont, which will be at the heart of the company's Lakefield chipsets. Lakefield uses a new 3D packaging technology called Foveros, and it promises more power efficiency and a smaller package, making it ideal for small and thin form factors. You may recall that, a few weeks ago, Microsoft announced that the upcoming Surface Neo would be powered by Lakefield.

Tremont makes use of a 6-wide (2x3-wide clustered) out-of-order decoder to offer better performance, as well as "significant gains" in instructions per cycle over the previous generation of low-power chips from Intel. It also has 4-wide allocation, 10 execution ports - seven for integer execution and three for vector execution -, a dual load/store pipeline, and up to 4.5MB of L2 cache. It can also come with configurations between single- and quad-core. Intel also touts Core-class branch prediction.

Tremont also packs a few new technologies from Intel, such as Accelerator interfacing Instructions, Intel Speed Shift, Trusted Execution Technology, Boot Guard, and Total Memory Encryption, all of which should help both performance and security. Tremont and Lakefield don't yet have a set release date, but it's been almost a year since Lakefield was first announced back in 2018, so it shouldn't take too much longer now.