Intel’s 14th and 15th Gen Core processors will rely on the tried and tested strategy of Refresh, Rebrand, and Reuse to avoid potential client roadmap delays. The 14th Gen desktop processors refresh the 13th Gen Raptor Lake-S family, while the 14th and 15th Gen mobility lineups include refreshes of their last-gen budget SKUs. If you’re a DIYer in the desktop space, the 15th Gen Arrow Lake parts are your best bet.
Luckily, Igor’s Lab has us covered with an early performance projection. The 13th Gen Core i9-13900K is used as the baseline for the testing. The Raptor Lake-S Refresh and Arrow Lake samples are 24-core CPUs with 8 P-cores, 16 E-cores, and a PL2 TDP of 253W/250W.
Arrow Lake doesn’t look as impressive as previously thought. For starters, the single copy SPECrate benchmarks only show a high single-digit performance gain compared to the Core i9-13900K. We get a 6% and 8% boost in floating point and integer workloads, respectively. In n-copy tests, Arrow Lake gets to stretch its legs. We see a healthy 21% and 15% uplift in floating point and integer workloads, respectively.
In more mainstream benchmarks like Speedometer and CrossMark, the 15th Gen Arrow Lake flagship takes a lead of 10-16% over the Core i9-13900K. Geekbench Multi-Core is an outlier with a 20% uplift. Meanwhile, the 14th Gen Raptor Lake Refresh sees a nominal 2% to 3% increment in these benchmarks.
The integrated graphics on Arrow Lake is a massive upgrade, offering at least twice the performance as Raptor Lake. 3DMark Time Spy and Wildlife Extreme Unlimited get a 2.4x and 2.2x boost, respectively. Intel is packing Arrow Lake with twice as many Xe-LP shaders (32EUs->64EUs) using Foveros 3D stacking, which explains the bump.
The 14th Gen Raptor Lake-S Refresh is slated to arrive this fall, with non-K CPUs planned for early 2024. Arrow Lake is expected to land sometime in late 2024 for the desktop DIY audience. A 40-core part is planned, but it’s unclear whether it’ll make it to the market.
