Intel Arrow Lake-H Laptop 128 EU “Xe-LPG+” & Arrow Lake-S Desktop 64 EU “Xe-LPG” iGPUs Tested

iGPUs of Intel's next-generation Arrow Lake-H Laptop & Arrow Lake-S Desktop CPUs, based on the Arc Alchemist architecture, have been tested.

It is no mystery by now that Intel's next-gen Arrow Lake CPUs will be reusing the Arc Alchemist graphics architecture. The laptop chips, Arrow Lake-H, will be featuring the slightly updated Xe-LPG+ architecture known as Alchemist+ while the desktop chips, Arrow Lake-S, will be using the same Arc Alchemist architecture we got with Meteor Lake. This will be the second outing of the Alchemist Xe-LPG architecture on desktops since Meteor Lake-PS CPUs have already introduced them on the LGA 1851 socket.

With that said, today's leak gives us a look at the two laptop and desktop iGPUs. Starting with the Arrow Lake-H CPU, we are looking at an 8 Xe-Core iGPU with 128 Execution units, a clock speed of 2.00 GHz, and 8 MB of L2 cache. This chip was running on the reference evaluation platform with DDR5 memory.

The Arrow Lake-S Desktop CPU is comprised of 4 Xe-cores for a total of 64 Execution units, 4 MB of L2 cache, and the same 2.00 GHz clock speed. The chip was running on an evaluation board with a pair of DDR5 UDIMMs. Now it should be remembered that Arrow Lake-S CPUs will be the first real outing of the Arc iGPU architecture for mainstream desktop consumers. Intel hasn't had any CPUs out yet which utilize its modern-day GPU architectures while AMD has already released RDNA 3 to the masses with its Ryzen 8000G family for AM5 desktop platforms.

So coming to the performance figures, the Intel Arrow Lake-S Desktop CPU scored 1053.56 Mpix/s in the GP(GPU) Processing benchmark in SiSoftware Sandra while the Arrow Lake-H Laptop CPU scored 1598.22 Mpix/s. The desktop chip has half the number of cores but it runs at a higher TDP of 65W (PL1) compared to the 45W (PL1) of the laptop chip.

So you are looking at a difference of around 50% between the two chips which is to be expected. These numbers aren't final as driver optimizations down the road can further improve performance. The good thing is that we've already seen Lunar Lake CPUs with Battlemage "Xe2-LPG" iGPUs appear in the previous leak and we can use that and other Intel iGPUs for comparisons:

The Intel Arrow Lake-H CPUs with 128 EU iGPUs are seen sitting ahead of the Arc A310, an entry-level Alchemist-based discrete graphics card, while the desktop Arrow Lake-S CPU is about 15% ahead of the top Meteor Lake 64 EU SKUs. That's a good showcase of performance for the Arrow Lake desktop and mobility family and it shows that Intel could go another round with its current Arc Alchemist & optimized Alchemist+ iGPUs before switching to next-gen Xe2 "Battlemage" & Xe3 "Celestial" chips for the mainstream masses.