Intel Unveils Next-Gen 'Arrow Lake' Desktop CPUs: They're All About Efficiency

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The unsurprising part of Intel’s pitch for its "Arrow Lake" desktop processors is its extensive emphasis on AI. The less-obvious new feature in a series of CPUs built for computers that don’t run on batteries? Energy efficiency.

“It's one of the largest power reductions and efficiency gains that Intel has seen in quite some time,” said Greg Boots, platform marketing manager for Intel’s client computing group, at a September 4 preview event at IFA in Berlin.

Arrow Lake—formally known as the Core Ultra 200S series, with sales starting October 24—introduces some significant architectural changes that Intel began hyping up two years ago.

Many of the changes map to the "Lunar Lake" series of laptop chips that the company introduced at IFA 2024. However, Arrow Lake aims at a market where Intel doesn’t face intense competition from Qualcomm's Snapdragon X series of laptop processors.

The Heart of Arrow Lake: Core (and Cost) Competition

Like previous Intel processors going back to the Alder Lake series introduced in 2021, Arrow Lake farms out operations to a hierarchy of specialized processing cores.

That maintains a serious design distance between Arrow Lake and AMD chips like the Ryzen 9000 Zen 5 series introduced in mid-2024, which constitutes Intel’s sole competition in desktop CPUs: Intel’s Santa Clara, Calif., neighbor has yet to adopt a hybrid architecture combining power—and efficiency-optimized cores.

As you'll see below, Intel is also ahead of AMD on pricing. Two examples: Its flagship Core Ultra 9 285K has a suggested retail price of $589 versus $649 for AMD's leading Ryzen 9 9950X desktop chip. Likewise, Intel's Core Ultra 7 CPU outpaces AMD's second-tier Ryzen 9 chip on core count while costing more than $100 less.

The initial lineup comprises five CPUs on the new LGA1851 socket, with the two ending in "F" indicating a lack of integrated graphics. As rumored, Intel has dropped support for its traditional thread-doubling Hyper-Threading with these chips.

Arrow Lake features versions of Intel's "Lion Cove" Performance (P) cores and "Skymont" Efficient (E) cores that debuted in Lunar Lake but includes more of them, depending on the configuration of individual processor models. That ranges from six to eight of the Lion Cove P-cores and from eight to 16 of the Skymont E-cores.

Intel backs those cores with a deeper bank of caches in Arrow Lake than in Lunar Lake. Intel has outfitted 4MB of L2 for each E-core cluster, 3MB of L2 for each P-core, and as much as 36MB of L3.

The P-cores further benefit from AI-based power management and an expanded scheduling framework to handle more transactions. At the same time, the E-cores see upgrades such as doubled vector and AI throughput, as well as hardware-based task prediction from Intel’s Thread Director.

Intel says these power-saving moves will pay off in improvements such as reduced gaming power consumption by as much as 165 watts (W) and a drop in CPU package temperatures during active gaming of as much as 17 degrees C.

Another Arrow Lake Addition: AI, of Course

Arrow Lake is also Intel’s first desktop processor architecture to integrate a neural processing unit (NPU), the company’s latest nod to the trend everybody else is chasing in personal computing. As Boots said at IFA, “AI is rapidly becoming a cornerstone of PC technology.”

Intel says this module, built on its NPU 3 architecture and packaging two neural compute engine tiles and 4MB of scratchpad memory, can hit 13 trillion operations per second (TOPS) at AI tasks, combined with up to 15 TOPS from the CPU proper and 8 TOPS from the GPU.

That amounts to far fewer TOPS from the NPU than the up to 48 TOPS available from Lunar Lake’s NPU. During the Q&A part of the IFA presentation, Josh Newman, general manager and vice president of product marketing and management at Intel’s Client Computing Group, chalked that up to the company’s design-process cycles getting slightly out of sync.

“What we did in Lunar Lake with the new NPU, we'll obviously bring to other segments in the future,” Newman said.

Arrow Lake’s integrated graphics processor (IGP), in turn, is built on the Xe IGP that Intel launched with its Meteor Lake laptop processor line. The Xe IGP combines four Xe cores with four ray-tracing units, 4MB of L2 cache, and DirectX 12 support.

Arrow Lake—to be manufactured mostly by TSMC on a variety of processes depending on the tile, another break from Intel’s past practice—uses Intel’s Foveros 3D packaging technology to combine all these parts as a series of tiles in one compact processor module.

Smarter Overclocking Features for Power Users

Intel’s focus on traditional desktop-PC enthusiasts with Arrow Lake includes multiple features to ease overclocking, such as acceleration steps as small as 16.67MHz, dual base clocks to allow different frequencies for the CPU’s tiles, and the option to override the chip’s internal voltage management.

Intel plans to add an AI-based overclocking feature to the Intel Killer performance-tuning suite sometime later. The suite can already automatically optimize app priority, bandwidth management, and access-point selection.

Asked at IFA about the potential of that to add to the computing industry’s growing catalog of AI fails by making a warranty-voiding move, Boots said Intel would exercise caution in designing that feature.

“I don't expect for our users to click a one-click AI overclocking and have that void their system,” he said. We asked Intel if that expectation had changed since early September but did not get a response before publishing.

More—make that more important—automated help will come on the security side via three built-in engines to monitor threats: First is linear address space separation to ward off side-channel attacks like Hertzbleed, second is Intel Boot Guard, and finally, the Intel Silicon Security Engine that shipped with Meteor Lake.

Why Arrow Lake Connectivity Trails Lunar Lake's

Arrow Lake can support an eye-watering amount of DDR5 RAM, up to 192GB with four 48GB memory modules depending on the motherboard at play, and it supports PCIe 5 connectivity to fast SSDs. However, it looks a step behind in its connectivity to other peripherals and devices, with support for Thunderbolt 4 instead of the newer Thunderbolt 5 and the older Wi-Fi 6E versus Wi-Fi 7, and Bluetooth 5.3, not Bluetooth 5.4.

Lunar Lake also sticks with the previous version of Thunderbolt but is current on the two wireless connectivity standards. Intel says it’s leaving those upgrades as options for computer vendors and builders to add as discrete hardware.

“It basically comes down to timing,” Newman said at IFA in a nod to the magnitude of changes in Arrow Lake. And desktops are a more forgiving environment for bolt-on upgrades. “They tend to be able to accommodate a lot more discrete options.”

What's Next? Arrow Lake Heads to Laptops

Intel will, however, add those standards to the forthcoming Arrow Lake-H portable-gaming processors, briefly teased during the IFA presentation and projected for the first quarter of 2025. That will bring the essential bits of this architecture into a smaller package, with Foveros 3D allowing for up to a 33% shrink in its dimensions while still delivering faster performance because of a much higher-powered Xe GPU.

Intel predicts that this graphics chip, doubling the Xe cores and L2 cache of the desktop Arrow Lake’s GPU, will hit up to 77 TOPS, with its NPU contributing the same 13 TOPS as in the desktop version and the CPU stepping back slightly to 9 TOPS.

Boots’ prediction at IFA: “Arrow Lake-H is shaping up to be a standout platform.” That may give Intel new goals for its next line of desktop processors if true.