Intel Arrow Lake Tipped to Offer 25-35% Better Performance than Meteor Lake Without Hyperthreading
A new update from Moore’s Law Is Dead sheds light on Intel’s upcoming Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake CPUs. The overall theme was quite positive and it seems that Intel is finally picking up pace to combat Zen5. With both competitors launching their best in just a few months, it’ll be interesting to see who comes out on top.
Arrow Lake to Offer 25-35% Performance than MTL at Same Core Counts
Arrow Lake is expected to launch in late 2024, hailing as the successor to Raptor Lake Refresh. Since Arrow Lake is seeing a significant architectural revamp, Intel has decided to axe hyperthreading from these CPUs.
Basically, for each core, you will only have one thread available. Despite this setback, Arrow Lake can deliver (reportedly) 25-35% better performance than Meteor Lake. Moreover, the same source alleges that this is enough to beat Zen5 in raw performance.
However, Arrow Lake’s NPU can only output 13 TOPS of performance, comparable to Meteor Lake. A second source confirms much of the same. Lunar Lake is expected to deliver above 40 TOPS, in the ballpark of AMD’s Strix offerings.
- Arrow Lake
- Intel 20A + TSMC N3B Process Nodes
- Lion Cove P-Core + Skymont E-Core architectures
- Up to 24 Cores / 24 Threads
- No Hyperthreading
- Supported on the LGA 1851 Socket
- Support for DDR5-6400 Memory (JEDEC)
- Launch Expected in H2 2024
Lunar Lake ‘Firmly’ Targeting Q4 2024 Launch: Same or Better iGPU Performance than MTL at Half the Power
MLID alleges that Lunar Lake, Intel’s go-to LP platform for 2024–25, is on schedule for a late 2024 launch. Apparently, it may arrive before Arrow Lake, provided that AXG (Intel’s Graphics Division) can iron out drivers for Battlemage.
Packed with 8 Xe-Cores based on Battlemage, Intel is expecting performance similar to Meteor Lake, at half the power level. Moreover, Arrow Lake’s mobile variants will use a modified version of Alchemist, named Alchemist+. The desktop variants will stick with the good old Alchemist, the one you see in Meteor Lake.
Given the expectations from Lunar Lake, it could very well be a handheld beast. The only factor remaining is the driver performance, which we cannot say much about for now.
- Lunar Lake
- Up to 4 Lion-Cove P Cores and 4 Skymont E Cores with no SMT
- 8 Xe2 (Battlemage) iGPU Cores
- Support for On Package LPDDR5x-8533 Memory
- CPU+GFX Tile Built Using TSMC’s N3B Node
- SoC Tile Built Using Intel 18A
- Next-Gen NPU 4.0
- Support for WiFi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4
- 40% Efficiency Uplift Touted
- 2.5 TFLOPS (12W) | 3.8 TFLOPS (Peak Performance)
Summary
Intel’s lineup looks packed this year and initial reports indicate almost no delays. Arrow Lake is slated to launch in very late 2024 and might just be a paper launch, pushed into 2025.
Since both AMD and Intel should deliver identical performance, the only determining factor is cost. Can Intel undercut AMD this time around? AMD is still opting for TSMC’s N4 node, whereas Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake heavily make use of TSMC’s new N3 process.
Source: MLID
