Intel Arrow Lake CPUs Get Increased Temperature “TJMax” & Power Ratings Versus Raptor Lake, Up To 105C

Intel's Arrow Lake & Panther Lake CPUs will feature a higher temperature limit of 105C compared to 100C on Raptor Lake CPUs.

Intel's Arrow Lake CPUs will be coming to a range of platforms including high-performance Desktop "S", Enthusiast Laptops "HX", High-end Laptops "H", and low-power "U" designs. These chips will be configured with different core counts and iGPU configurations but it looks like the entire lineup will have one thing in common and those are increased temperature limits or "TJMax".

TJMax is a temperature limit that is the officially rated safe limit after which the CPU will lower its clock speed to preserve the integrity and prevent silicon from degrading or damaging itself over a prolonged use. According to @Jaykihn, Intel's Arrow Lake and Panther Lake CPUs will feature increased temperature limits of up to 105C which is 5C higher than Raptor Lake CPUs (100C). It is stated that Lunar Lake CPUs will retain the 100C TJMax design.

TJMax for Arrow Lake and Panther Lake is 105C.

Lunar Lake retains the previous 100C.

— Jaykihn (@jaykihn0) July 15, 2024

Some would say that the increased temperatures will prevent silicon degradation and prevent the CPU from running into the same issues that are currently affecting the 14th Gen & 13th Gen lineup but those issues happen despite the CPUs hitting their TJMax limit. Furthermore, the increased limit can be due to the higher density that the TSMC N3B process node has to offer. For comparison, the AMD Ryzen 9000 CPUs based on the N4P node have a maximum operating temperature of 95C so the blue team has a 10C higher rating which is a lot.

Now temperature limits don't mean anything unless we know what the actual temperatures of these chips are. It's just a safe limit & while more recent CPUs have been seen touching or getting close to their TJMax limits, that may or may not be the case for Intel's Arrow Lake CPUs. Board makers such as MSI recently introduced a new BIOS feature called "CPU Fast Throttle Threshold" which allowed users to manually set TJMax limits beyond the official rating, up to 115C which will help you degrade your CPU silicon even faster and let you experience the joys of an unstable PC.

In addition to the temperature limits, @jaykihn also shared the Power Rails Electrical DC specs for the Intel Arrow Lake-S Desktop CPUs. Do note that these aren't the power limits (PL1/PL2/PL4) but rather the voltages and the current for the CPU and GPU cores. Following is how it all stacks up:

First up, we can note that the VccCore or CPU voltage has been increased to 1.77V from 1.72V while the GPU voltages have been increased to 1.52V from 1.50V. The current ratings have also increased a bit with the top Unlocked SKUs seeing a 13-21% bump, the 65W SKUs seeing a 5-18% bump, and the 35W SKUs seeing a 49-79% bump.

Based on our previous report, we did mention that the Intel Arrow Lake-S Desktop CPUs will offer lower power than Raptor Lake and that might be true despite the higher voltage and current ratings. With that said, the launch is expected to take place by the end of 2024 in October so stay tuned.