Intel Arrow Lake “Core Ultra Series 2” Desktop CPUs Cut On Hyper-Threading & LP-E Cores, Incorporate 4 Xe-Cores & NPU

New information regarding Intel's next-gen Arrow Lake-S Desktop CPUs has been revealed which suggests the "Core Ultra Series 2" branding.

The latest information comes from Golden Pig Upgrade over at social media platform, Bilibili. and covers a range of topics regarding Intel's next major launch in its CPU portfolio codenamed Arrow Lake. I believe that one of the reasons Golden Pig Upgrade decided to make such a long post was the recent inflow of very bogus information surrounding the next-gen Arrow Lake-S Desktop SKUs since some outlets reported on 15900K and 15700K chips which was seemingly incorrect. That is the literal start of his post so let's cover it in detail.

Intel Arrow Lake "Core Ultra Series 2" Family For Desktops & Mobile

First up, we have the naming scheme for the Intel Arrow Lake CPUs. The chips will follow the same branding for both desktop and mobile parts under the "Core Ultra Series 2" branding. This means that Intel's 14th Gen CPUs, codenamed Raptor Lake, will be the last lineup to use a dual naming scheme (1**** for desktops and 1** for mobile). The Arrow Lake CPUs will use a similar naming scheme as the mobility chips which will make things a bit easier despite the new naming scheme still being a mess in its regards.

Intel Arrow Lake-S Desktop CPUs will be heading to the next-gen LGA 1851 socket featured on 800-series motherboards with the following features:

No HT or LP E-Cores But New iGPU & NPU Cores

Next up, we have information about what's included and what's excluded from the desktop chips. The Intel Arrow Lake-S Desktop CPUs will do away with two major components that were featured in the previous desktop and mobile parts, these include hyper-threading and LP-E cores. The LP-E cores are a component that was first featured on Meteor Lake and will continue to be part of their mobility lineup but not including hyper-threading was something that was made evident in other reports too. It looks like the E-Cores will now carry the same tasks as HT & Intel is going to go full-in on its hybrid core design with future desktop chips too.

Furthermore, we get to know about the iGPU side of things. It is stated that Intel Arrow Lake-S CPUs for desktops will only include 4 Xe-Cores which is half the amount featured on the Meteor Lake CPU family.

This decision means that we will likely not see Intel being as aggressive on the iGPU front on the desktop side as AMD's Ryzen 8000G which features the full RDNA 3 iGPU configurations (Radeon 780M). Since Arrow Lake's iGPUs will feature just 4 Xe Cores, they won't be tagged as Arc Graphics & would instead be labeled as Intel Graphics since their performance tier isn't enough to be called Arc. They will get the same driver-level optimizations as the Arc GPU family. A previous report said that Arrow Lake-S Desktop CPUs will utilize the standard Xe-LPG (Alchemist) architecture while the Arrow Lake mobility SKUs will utilize the optimized and refined Xe-LPG+ (Alchemist+) cores.

Lastly, the inside talks about specific SKUs and their related process technologies. For desktops, it will be a single 6+8 SKU that will feature the Intel 20A process node for the compute tile while all of the remaining chips are said to be from TSMC (Desktop & Mobile). The 6+8 configuration will be featured on the Core Ultra 5 2** series desktop parts which will utilize a Non-K design. There is also a mention of Arrow Lake-S and Arrow Lake-HX CPUs still relying on a PCH for the specific platforms and won't do away with it like AMD.

Intel Arrow Lake-S Desktop CPUs are expected to launch in the second half of 2024 so stay tuned as we get more official details for these next-gen chips.