Intel Arrow Lake CPUs touted as first products "influenced" by Royal Core project could ditch Hyper-Threading altogether

Covering igor’s Lab’s report of a 24-core Intel Arrow Lake-S desktop CPU appearing up to 21% faster than the Raptor Lake Core i9-13900K, we noted that the chip on the show could be a non-retail sample and the final performance could be considerably better. In line with our assertion, the latest leak from Moore’s Law Is Dead alleges that the performance estimates that igor’s Lab leaked could be of early samples and not the “final projections”.

One of leaker’s Intel insiders suggested that the performance demonstrated by igor’s Lab “lines up” with a physical A0 sample that was tested back in Q2 2023. The 24-core sample yielded 3-20% performance gain over the Core i9-13900K. Despite convincingly beating the Core i9-13900K, the insider claimed that the ARL chip was an “i7-tier” product without Hyper-threading (HT) and with potentially reduced clock speeds.

In other words, the retail ARL-S Core i7 with final clock speeds could be more than 20% faster than the Core i9-13900K.

Intel Arrow Lake Hyper-Threading and performance

Surprisingly, MLID reports that the Intel Arrow Lake processor could lack Hyper-Threading (HT) altogether. According to one Intel source, Team Blue might ditch HT in Arrow Lake chips as “Hyper-threading is not listed in Arrow Lake’s Plan of Record documents from Q2”. The source further noted that despite missing HT, MLID’s previous of report of up to 40% higher multi-core performance over Meteor Lake still stands as those performance simulations were “conducted on the model’s lacking Hyper-Threading”. MLID expects the top ARL chip to outperform Raptor Lake by 30-40% in single-threading and more than 40% in multi-threading.

Assuming ARL chips lack any HT, the question becomes: Why?

Per MLID, Intel’s original plans for Arrow Lake included HT, but the company couldn’t get either 2-way or 4-way HT working on the Lion Cove P-cores and ultimately decided to ditch the technology not to delay ARL’s launch. The leaker maintains that Arrow Lake is the first product that is “influenced” by Jim Keller’s Royal Core project. Among other Royal Core ideas like 4-way HT and new instructions, Intel is reportedly planning to replace HT with “Rentable Units (RU)” and the company decided it wasn’t wise to commit resources to get HT working on ARL when it is going to get removed altogether in Royal Core products.

Unfortunately, the leaker doesn’t share any information regarding Rentable Units. As such, we don’t know what they are or how they work. So, we’ll have to wait and see if the technology ever shows up and, if it does, how does it differ from traditional HT.

Intel Arrow Lake release date

Finally, the leaker claims that the B silicon packing considerable upgrades over A0 silicon that was featured in igor’s Lab’s leak is scheduled to be tested later this year. The retail launch of the 8+16 and lower tier ARL CPUs is reportedly set for the end of 2024 with the top 40-core (8+32) tile set to release in Q2/3 2025.

It is important to remember that Arrow Lake is far out which makes it difficult to ascertain what the final Arrow Lake CPUs will look like when they come to the market. So, take the information with a giant grain of salt.

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