Intel's Arrow Lake is coming this month - what to expect

Intel is under pressure to move. The company is not doing well at the moment and has gone from being the undisputed chip giant to a takeover candidate. It is therefore not presumptuous to say that the future of the company depends on the new Lunar Lake processors for notebooks and Arrow Lake for the desktop. The latter should be presented on 10 October and go on sale two weeks later

Made at TSMC with new architecture

The Arrow Lake CPUs come with a novelty in the desktop sector: Instead of being manufactured in-house, the chips will be produced at TSMC. The N3 process will most likely be used. The original plan was for the CPUs to come from the company's own 20A production facility. Intel is now skipping this process because the successor 18A is expected to be better than previously anticipated.

It is also clear that Arrow Lake is a completely new architecture. What characterises it in detail is not yet known. Intel will certainly reveal more about this at the launch.

These models are expected to be the first

What's new with Arrow Lake is not only the architecture and production, but also the model designation. Instead of the 15th Core i generation, as was the case with the previous nomenclature, the series is called Core Ultra 200. At least the following three models will be presented in descending order of performance:

• Core Ultra 9 285K
• Core Ultra 7 265K
• Core Ultra 5 245K

More chips from the Core Ultra 200 series are expected to follow next year.

Intel is to dispense with hyperthreading in the new processors, so the number of cores is the same as the number of threads. The top model will have 24 cores (8 performance and 16 efficiency). According to the rumours, the 265K has four cores less (8 performance and 12 efficiency) and the 245K still has 14 cores (6 performance and 8 efficiency).

The clock rates and TDP are said to be lower than those of the 13th and 14th Core i generation. The former clearly below 6 GHz. The flagship model in particular should benefit from the lower TDP - it was the notorious hotspur in previous generations.

The first tests will have to show what this means in terms of performance. According to a leak, the Core 9 Ultra 285K has increased its multi-core performance by around eleven per cent compared to its predecessor. AMD's current flagship beats the new Intel CPU by twelve per cent.

New socket - once again

After three generations - one of which was a refresh - Intel is retiring the socket 1700. The LGA 1851 socket has nine per cent more pins than its predecessor. The new platform will only support DDR5 RAM. The Z890 chipset should also offer better connectivity such as native Thunderbolt 4 and extended PCIe 5.0 support than its predecessor.

The processors look promising. After the disappointing launch of AMD's Ryzen 9000 series in August, Intel could score points with the Core Ultra 200. However, it is questionable to what extent Intel can make up for the damage to its image. It will probably take more than a successful CPU generation. Whether the former chip giant can pull its head out of the noose with the new processors will become clear at the end of the month.