Detailed Intel Arrow Lake and Arrow Lake Refresh leak reveals massive performance gains, release dates, and core counts

After the reveal of the Intel Meteor Lake CPUs for notebooks and the imminent launch of the 14th-gen Raptor Lake Refresh parts, all eyes are set on the next big desktop and mobility generation from Team Blue. Termed Arrow Lake, the chips are slated to come to market in 2024 with reportedly big performance increases over the 13th-gen Raptor Lake processors. Per the latest Moore’s Law Is Dead video which also discussed Nova Lake, Lunar Lake, Panther Lake, and Beast Leak processors, Intel could be preparing to release Arrow Lake and Arrow Lake Refresh chips in late 2024 and H2 2025 respectively.

Intel Arrow Lake

MLID claims that the Intel Arrow Lake chips could be “slipping to very late 2024” with notebook processors dropping in volume sometime in early 2025. The release date for the ARL-S desktop chips is in line with the MLID’s previous leak, so nothing has changed in this regard.

What has changed however is the leaker’s report about multi-core performance gain. MLID alleged in an earlier video that flagship Arrow Lake processors with up to 8 Lion Cove P-cores + 16 Skymont E-cores and 2 LP-cores could see a 40+% increase in multi-core performance over the 13th-gen Raptor Lake CPUs. The leaker now seems uncertain about the average multi-core performance bump and reports that the ARL-S chips could offer a “decent MT” performance increase. However, the all-thread gain isn’t likely to be “as high as some are expecting”.

Talking about multi-core performance, MLID has doubled down on his previous assertions that Arrow Lake processors lack Hyper-Threading completely. Interestingly, MLID also rules out “rentable units” for ARL CPUs.

Furthermore, the leaker suggests that the Arrow Lake chips bring, at a minimum, a 25% uplift in single-threaded with a max gain of no more than 40% over Raptor Lake chips.

Finally, owing to the purported launch of the desktop Arrow Lake products that has been pushed to the end of 2024, MLID sees the situation playing out in AMD’s favor with Team Red beating Intel in single-core and multi-core avenues with Zen 5 until the release of ARL.

Intel Arrow Lake Refresh

Expected to be utilizing the same TSMC N3B/Intel 20A process as the vanilla Arrow Lake, MLID reports that an Arrow Lake Refresh (ARL-R) is in the works. The ARL-R could top out at a bonkers 42 cores with 8 Lion Cove P-cores, 32 Skymont E-cores, and 2 low-power LP-cores. Owing to such a big increase in core counts, the leaker estimates an amazing 30-50% increase in multi-threaded performance over Arrow Lake.

That said, the Arrow Lake Refresh’s single-thread performance may only see a single-digit bump.

Long story short, it appears that the 2024 Arrow Lake and 2025 Arrow Lake Refresh processors are going to bring a massive increase in single-threaded and multi-threaded performance respectively. But, as is the case with all leaks, we won’t know anything for sure until Intel formally releases the processors.

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