A bunch of new (alleged) details regarding Intel’s 15th Gen Arrow Lake CPUs have surfaced. Right off the bat, we would like to highlight that the 14th Gen desktop family will solely comprise the Raptor Lake-S Refresh as Meteor Lake has been scrapped. Furthermore, Arrow Lake will form the 15th Gen Core family with up to 40 cores and a single performance boost of over 30%.
Updated: According to RedGamingTech and Raichu, Arrow Lake will maintain the 8P+16E core configuration of existing designs.
Arrow Lake will be fabbed on the Intel 20A (2nm) process with backside power delivery and Nanoribbon (GAA) transistors. According to multiple sources (MLID, Creature), the 15th Gen Arrow Lake processors will feature up to 40 cores, including 8P and 32E cores. The performance cores will be upgraded to the Lion Cove microarchitecture while the efficiency cores will leverage the Skymont core architecture. Arrow Lake-S is slated to arrive in the last few months of 2024 and should leverage TSMC’s 3nm node for the iGPU tile.
Like the Meteor Lake mobile processors, the Arrow Lake-S desktop chips will feature a chiplet design with four tiles: Compute or CPU, Graphics, SoC, and I/O. The latter two will likely leverage TSMC’s 5nm or 6nm-class nodes.
Coming to performance, there are no hard numbers yet. However, if I were to guess I’d say a 30-35% single core uplift (15-20% IPC increase) is warranted alongside a massive multi-threaded boost courtesy of the massive E-core cluster. The iGPU should also boast the 2nd Gen Xe-HPC graphics architecture with gaming performance on par with contemporarily low-end dGPUs such as the GTX 1050, 1050 Ti, or even the 1650.
