Leaked internal slide shows underwhelming performance gains for Intel's 2024 Arrow Lake desktop CPUs

Intel’s Raptor Lake-Refresh desktop CPUs are almost here, and, from what was leaked via an official slide released by Intel China, it looks like the performance uplift over last year’s Raptor Lake is just enough to match or slightly overtake AMD’s Zen 4 processors with 3D V-Cache. This is somewhat expected, since Intel is not releasing new motherboard chipsets this year, and the new architecture introduced with Meteor Lake for laptops will only hit desktops in late 2024 with Arrow Lake. However, according to an internal slide leaked on the Anandtech forums last month, Arrow Lake-S might not bring a significant performance increase, either.

The internal slide was shared by uzzi38, who has a decent track record in the leaker community. Most of the information is blocked out in order to focus on what is relevant, but we can see that Intel expects the Arrow Lake-S processors to bring at most 15% performance gains in multi-threading workloads and 5% in single threaded loads, presumably over Raptor Lake-Refresh.

This may sound somewhat underwhelming, considering that Arrow Lake is built on the 20A nodes featuring PowerVia tech and the new architecture is supposed to introduce an improved core cluster, with new Lion Cove performance cores and Skymont efficient cores. Apparently, the performance increase is not looking too great because Intel will be dropping the hyperthreading technology, as suggested by kopite7kimi on X (formerly Twitter).

From Moore’s Law Is Dead recent leak on Nova Lake, we learned that Arrow Lake (ARL) will be followed by Arrow Lake-Refresh in 2025, while Nova Lake will revamp things once again by introducing the rentable unit technology that is essentially hyperthreading 2.0. If kopite7kimi is right, Arrow Lake-Refresh may still be missing hyperthreading and performance increase may be minimal. Nevertheless, there is a HardwareTimes article that claims rentable units could come with Intel 15th gen CPUs (ARL).

Another tidbit from the internal slide that seems fairly surprising is the mention of Thunderbolt 4 support for Arrow Lake, when Intel already launched Thunderbolt 5 this year. Provided the slide is indeed accurate, Intel could be postponing desktop TB 5 support to 2025.

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