Intel Arrow Lake: everything we know about the 15th-gen chips

Intel Arrow Lake, or Core Ultra 200, is Team Blue’s next generation of processors. The successor to its 14th-generation CPUs on desktop, Arrow Lake will debut in October 2024 and will be the first desktop processors to use the new Intel Core Ultra branding. It was initially thought that Arrow Lake may launch alongside a Bartlett Lake series of CPUs, but those are now rumored to debut in early 2025.

We’ve been languishing with leaks and rumors for the past year, but Intel has now spilled the beans and given us all kinds of juicy details. Here’s everything you need to know about Arrow Lake.

Pricing and availability

Intel revealed the prices for its mainline K-series Arrow Lake processors in October 2024, as well as they’re intended launch date. They were initially unveiled on October 10, with a launch date for the first CPUs set on October 24.

As for pricing, the flagship Intel Core Ultra 9 285K will debut with a suggested retail price of $589. The Core Ultra 7 265K and 265KF will launch with prices of $394 and $379, respectively. The more modest Core Ultra 5 245K and 245KF will hit store shelves priced at $309 and $294, respectively.

Should these chips prove popular, initial shortages could affect pricing temporarily, driving up the cost shortly after launch.

Arrow Lake specs

As with recent generations of Intel processors, Arrow Lake is a tile-based design, with performance and efficiency cores running alongside an onboard GPU and other accelerators for AI and video transcoding.

Following months of leaks and rumors, Intel released the hard specifications for Arrow Lake on October 10.

These specification confirmed the long-standing rumor that Intel was dropping hyperthreading for this generation. That brings down the number of overall threads for each of these CPUs compared to their predecessors. That doesn’t seem to have hampered multi-threading performance, but along with the slight reductions in clock speed this generation, that may be where the efficiency gains were made.

Indeed, while the specifications suggest that these CPUs can pull up to 250 watts, Intel has pledged much greater efficiency during gaming over the 14th generation. Along with lower temperatures, it claims that gaming will rarely go over 165W, although performance will merely be the same as the last-generation 14900K, or even slightly worse.

The performance cores are based on a new Lion Cove architecture, while the efficiency cores will be based on a new Skymont design. There’s also a new generation of onboard Xe graphics, which Intel claims can be up to twice as fast as their predecessors, as well as a new neural processing unit (NPU) that can deliver 13 tera operations per second (TOPS) in its own right, with a further potential 8 TOPS from the GPU, and 15 TOPS from the CPU.

Arrow Lake is built on a new LGA 1851 socket design, with more pins than 13th- and 14th-generation designs on the LGA 1700 socket. That means you’ll need a new motherboard for Arrow Lake processors and won’t be able to upgrade from 12th-, 13th-, or 14th-generation PCs directly. However, it will be the same physical size as LGA 1700, so coolers should be compatible.

That new socket brings a new generation of motherboard chipsets, too, as well as mandated DDR5 — no more DDR4 on Intel boards with this generation. Memory speed support rises to DDR5 6400, with up to 48GB per stick, with a maximum of 192GB in each system. Arrow Lake will also bring support for Wi-Fi 6E and Thunderbolt 4, with the potential for motherboard manufacturers to add support for Thunderbolt 5 and Wi-Fi 7.

We initially thought that Intel would use its own 20A node for Arrow Lake. However, it revealed during IFA 2024 that it’s shifting gears toward developing a smaller node: 18A. Arrow Lake is therefore said to be manufactured by “external partners,” which most likely means Intel’s rival fabricator TSMC.

Bartlett Lake

There have also been rumors that Intel will debut a new Bartlett Lake design for low-end processors alongside Arrow Lake in 2024, utilizing the older Intel 4 3nm design. While that may still happen in the future, Intel hasn’t revealed any plans to launch other ranges of CPUs in 2024. Indeed, the most likely outcome is that Bartlett Lake will launch in 2025. It’s designed to offer continued support for the LGA1700 socket, and offer competition for AMD’s aging, but certainly not unpopular Ryzen 5000 generation, which continues to see support with new designs like the 5700X3D, and new 5000 GT series.

Barlett Lake will reportedly based on updated Raptor Lake silicon designs, so it should be compatible with existing LGA 1700 platforms. It should have DDR4 memory, too, potentially making it a cheaper upgrade path for Intel fans.

The latest rumors as of September 2024 are that Bartlett Lake will come in a few unique configurations, including a performance core-only design, with up to 12 P cores, and a more typical P + E core design with the usual Intel configurations.

Bartlett BTL-S SKUs.

Hybrid targeting early Jan’25, P-core only targeting Q3’25 pic.twitter.com/ueqTJZBOdi

— Jaykihn (@jaykihn0) July 15, 2024

While these are unlikely to offer comparable performance to Arrow Lake, the extension of the LGA 1700 socket is great for anyone on an existing Intel platform, especially if your high-end CPU is having trouble from the latest Intel fallout.

Arrow Lake performance

We don’t have third-party benchmarks for Arrow Lake just yet, but will hear more when we get closer to the October 24 launch date. For now, Intel has given us some performance graphics of its own to consider, which do show impressive efficiency gains, but they aren’t particularly exciting from a raw performance perspective.

In the above graph, we can see that there are some slight performance improvements in particular games for the 285K versus its predecessors, while drawing notably less power. In the below graph, though, it’s clear that although certain games do show some benefit from being played on Intel hardware, there is a big performance advantage for AMD’s best in other popular games, like Cyberpunk 2077.

Intel also talked up the lower temperatures achieved during gaming, which is always welcome, but not particularly indicative of greater performance. Indeed, that would typically suggest the opposite.

In terms of raw CPU performance, Intel claims that its 24 core, 24 thread 285K can beat out AMD’s 16 core, 32-thread 9950X and the previous generation 14900K in some CPU benchmarks.

This raw power reportedly translates to some more tangible benefits in specific creative applications, in specific scenarios. However, the across the board differences appear somewhat negligible, even in Intel’s own slide.

These performance results from Intel don’t paint a particularly rosy picture of Arrow Lake. Yes, they’re more efficient, and there may offer slightly better productivity performance in certain scenarios than AMD’s alternatives, but it’s rarely dramatic, and in gaming — something AMD’s first Ryzen 9000-series processors weren’t exactly praised for — is a toss-up at best.

That won’t be enough to compete with AMD’s impending Ryzen 9000 X3D CPUs, which are likely to raise the performance bar for gaming considerably.

Cautiously pessimistic

Intel has had a rough few years, and Arrow Lake was very much hoped to be a savior design, bringing Intel back to performance and efficiency parity with AMD and offering a real uplift over the unimpressive 14th-generation Raptor Lake refresh. based Intel’s own metrics, that doesn’t appear to be the case, and if that’s this generation putting its best foot forward, that doesn’t bode well.

If this is a case of Intel under-promising, there is always the potential for an over-delivery, but we’ll not be holding our breath on this one. Look out for more information in the coming weeks, with full review coverage on October 24.