Leaked roadmap reveals details for Intel’s upcoming Arrow Lake, Lunar Lake and Nova Lake processor families

Back in June, Moore’s Law is Dead was leaking some interesting info regarding some of the processor families that would be launched by Intel after Alder Lake. We already knew that Raptor Lake would follow Alder Lake as a refresh some time in the second half of 2022. MLID then briefly mentioned Meteor Lake following Raptor Lake and Lunar Lake following Meteor Lake with exponentially increased IPCs and core counts. Just recently, a Redditor with the “mooreslawisdead” handle leaked an updated CPU roadmap all the way through 2025 with a couple of new families, yet Tom from MLID claims that this was not him, so we are not too sure about the authenticity of this latest leak. Meanwhile, the reddit post disappeared and the username got deleted, but Curmudgeon666 on the Anandtech forums saved the info and shared it.

Most of the info detailing the first few families succeeding Alder Lake appear to be in line with MLID’s leaks, lending some credence to the new roadmap. There is one notable difference, nevertheless. While MLID claimed that Meteor Lake would be followed by Lunar Lake, the new roadmap is introducing a new family called Arrow Lake between the two. Lunar Lake would then be followed by Nova Lake that is supposed to feature a radically new architecture. Here is the complete info including estimated release dates, core cluster naming scheme and performance comparison with AMD and Apple:

• Alder Lake (Golden Cove/Gracemont) Q4’21 / Q1’22 - Predicted to be competitively weak vs AMD/Apple offerings at that time.
• Raptor Lake (Raptor Cove / Gracemont) Q3’22 / Q4’22 - 10% CPU perf boost and 8/16 configuration puts Intel back on par but expect AMD/Apple to refresh their products as well.
• Meteor Lake (Redwood Cove / Crestmont) Q2’23 - Intel’s first true chiplet or tile based design. Different dies built on TSMC / Intel processes. More of a node shrink with single digit performance improvements. AMD will again extend lead with Zen 4+ / 5.
• Arrow Lake (Lion Cove / Skymont) Q4’23 - Will feature an updated compute tile with 8/32 config for the high end enthusiast products. Might achieve parity with AMD offerings at the time but loses out to Apple in power efficiency.
• Lunar Lake (Lion Cove / Skymont) Q4’24 - This is the product that will use TSMC 3nm as reported by Nikkei. Big performance jump expected and designed to achieve parity or beat AMD and Apple in both performance and power efficiency.
• Nova Lake (Panther Cove [tentative]/ Darkmont) 2025 - This will mark the biggest architectural change in CPI architecture since the introduction of the Core architecture in 2006. Intel is working to build an entirely new architecture from the ground up, much like Ryzen with up to 50% CPU performance improvement from Lunar Lake. This is also the reason why Glenn Hinton (retired CPU architect) was recently rehired by Gelsinger.

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