Intel 15th-gen Arrow Lake: Everything we're expecting

 

The competition between AMD and Intel continues to simmer away, providing great processors for us to test and use inside more powerful systems. AMD's Ryzen chips are built on a more efficient platform, allowing the company to draw out more performance without sucking too much power. Intel is struggling with this in its fabrication plants, but we're hopeful about the upcoming 15th-gen Arrow Lake launch. Intel needs to have a successful launch to bring it back to AMD and maintain healthy competition and here's everything we know.

Intel should be able to shrink its process node
Smaller usually means better

We're fully expecting Intel to bring a new platform and processors, which will be built on its 20A process, the equivalent of a 2nm manufacturing process. For perspective, Intel's 14th-gen chips are built using a 7nm process, behind AMD with TMSC's 5nm process. The smaller the process, the more transistors can be crammed onto the silicon, and the better the performance or efficiency. This would be a substantial upgrade for Intel, which has lagged the competition with its internal struggles.

There have been rumors and speculation online about how much of an impact this will have on the 15th-gen processors from Intel. A post on AnandTech's forum suggests we should see an approximate 15% gain for multi-core performance. What we are expecting to see is some form of improvement over the current generation of processors. Raptor Lake Refresh wasn't brilliant but bought Intel some time to focus on putting everything in place to make Arrow Lake happen.

AI Inside
There's that buzz word again

Artificial intelligence (AI) is still the hot topic of the day and we are expecting Intel to capitalize on demand. Arrow Lake processors may utilize the Intel Ce-LPG Plusm GPU architecture, which will benefit from Extended Matrix Extensions (XMX), an AI acceleration engine. This would enable the new Intel chips to expedite data processing, as well as boost graphics and video performance. Intel is marketing Arrow Lake as the "world's first gaming CPUs with [an] AI accelerator."

With the rise of the AI PC, Intel positioning itself with accelerators integrated into the CPU package puts it in a strong position against AMD.

Arrow Lake may have a late 2024 launch
Plenty of new processors to come

Intel teased Arrow Lake with a 2024 or 2025 launch, though we fully expect the company to roll out the new processor family later this year.

In terms of what we will be seeing for cores and threads, that's anyone's guess. Intel could push further by bolting yet additional P-cores or E-cores to the new Arrow Lake processors, but it could also maintain what we've got for each Core tier and simply improve performance elsewhere without touching cores, threads, and speeds. Intel will likely launch new motherboard chipsets, a new LGA 1851 socket, and even mandate DDR5 system memory.

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