Recently, the leak news about Intel's next-generation desktop processor, the Core Ultra 2 series "Arrow Lake-S", has attracted a lot of attention. According to the news, this series may continue the naming scheme of the Core Ultra 1 series "Meteor Lake" launched by Intel on mobile platforms as a new generation of customer processors. The "Arrow Lake-S" will feature a new socket LGA1851 socket that retains heatsink compatibility compared to the LGA1700. Unlike the mobile platform's "Meteor Lake", the "Arrow Lake-S" will feature a dual-chip solution to meet the desktop platform's need for more PCIe lanes to support more NVMe storage devices or high-bandwidth devices.
Another important discovery is that "Arrow Lake-S" will eliminate the low-power island E-core in the processor SoC block. All CPU cores will be located in compute blocks and will be manufactured with Intel 20A process nodes. This is Intel's first adoption of Gaafets and back-powered process nodes, as well as advanced second-generation EUV lithography technology. The compute blocks will be configured with 8P+8E CPU cores, with 8 "Lion Cove" P-cores with 3MB of dedicated L2 cache, providing higher IPC performance than the "Redwood CoVe" P-cores currently driving "Meteor Lake". The microarchitecture of the e-core is "Skymont", which will bring another round of IPC improvements.
When it comes to integrated graphics, Intel tends to use smaller integrated graphics in customer desktop processors. The "Arrow Lake-S" features the smallest version of the XE-LPG+ integrated graphics card, with only 4 XE cores (64 execution units or 512 unified shaders). This is in line with Intel's approach to "Meteor Lake". Some low-end processor models may only have fewer XE cores. In addition, Intel will also add a second-generation NPU (Neural Processing Unit) to the "Arrow Lake-S," making it the company's first desktop processor to support the Intel AI Boost feature set. The performance of this NPU is expected to increase by nearly three times, providing better AI inference performance for desktop users.
According to the news, Intel is expected to launch the Core Ultra 2 series "Arrow Lake-S" desktop processors in the second half of 2024. The launch of this series has attracted a lot of attention, and people are looking forward to its performance and features.