The future, both in laptops and desktops, are disaggregated processors or with chiplets and despite the fact that AMD has been ahead of Intel in this regard, one of the advantages that this approach allows is to launch new variants of a processor with only change one of the small chips. This is the case of Arrow Lake, which in general will share many things in common with Meteor Lake, but with a more advanced Compute Die that allows Arrow Lake-S to have a higher number of cores.
What do we know so far about Arrow Lake-S?
To this day, they are all rumors awaiting definitive news from Intel that will allow us to get a more approximate idea. The story would be that the canceled desktop Meteor Lake would have graduated to Arrow Lake-S in recent months. Gaining not only an average of 20% higher in IPC, but configurations of 8 P-Cores and 16 E-Cores, similar to those of the current Intel Core 13, while in Meteor Lake the thing would be 6+8. Put another way, Intel would have decided to move up a generation from the point where there wouldn’t be much of a difference in performance between Raptor and Meteor.
Specifically, there is talk of a single chip, but in three different TDP configurations at the moment: 125 W, 65 W and 35 W. Which leads us to wonder if the last chip will be an HX variant for gaming laptops given its low consumption or if Intel intends to open up a new category of desktop processors. Otherwise, the rest of the chip will be the same as Meteor, but since we’ve seen Intel doing this in the last two generations, a repeat of the play wouldn’t be surprising.
In any case, we cannot forget that it will be the first time that Intel will deploy its 20A node, and our question is whether they will have everything ready for a launch in the first half of 2024. What do we think? There is too much optimism in that aspect and we think it is an overly optimistic prediction.
What else has leaked?
Arrow Lake-S uses the LGA1851 socket, which was also created for the canceled Meteor Lake-S with a two-chipset strategy. On the one hand, for desktop PCs we will have the Z890, B860, and H810 chipsets in order from best to worst technical specifications. However, Intel plans to release the chip for low-end workstations, but this will require using other motherboards with the same socket, but with the W880 and Q870 chipsets, and this is where we get into an interesting topic.
Arrow Lake-S’s integrated memory controller supports DDR5 memory, which means that it will abandon DDR4 and at a speed of 6.4B transfers per second without overclocking and with capacities of 48 GB per DIMM module. The point is that if the CPU is designed for workstations, then it is going to incorporate support for U-DIMMs with ECC memory, and not only that, it is possible that Intel will go beyond the limit of two memory channels and even 4 motherboard sockets for non-PC motherboards.
