This year, Intel will yank its existing Raptor Lake desktop platform out by the roots and replace it with Arrow Lake. This upcoming platform will be new from the ground up, as it'll be the first CPU on a brand new LGA 1851 socket. The chips will also be the product of a new, more advanced process, so expectations are high. Now, a leaker states that these chips will come in two configurations, either 8P+16E for high-end CPUs or a 6P+8E design, which sounds like a Core Ultra 5 lineup.
The person leaking this news has a protected account on X and deletes leaks after a few minutes, so people are encouraged to screenshot them. That's also the case for the latest tweets, which Wccftech captured. They state that the Core 5 Ultra 240F will be the company's entry-level desktop chip and will use a mix of both configurations. The design will allow Intel to use good chips for midrange parts, and also take damaged high-end chips and rebadge them for midrange purposes.
It's also possible Intel might be using TSMC 3nm for the 8P+16E chips, which will match Raptor Lake's high-end chips in core count by offering 24 cores. However, since hyper-threading is reportedly going bye-bye with Arrow Lake, they will feature eight fewer threads overall compared with Raptor Lake. It will reportedly use its own Intel 20A process for midrange CPUs like the Core Ultra 5 series, potentially setting up a head-to-head competition within its processor lineup between Intel and TSMC, which could be quite interesting in benchmark results.
Arrow Lake will be the first significant update to Intel's desktop platform since Alder Lake debuted to much fanfare in late 2021, so a lot is riding on this launch. Since then, we've had two versions of Raptor Lake, featuring only mild changes over their predecessors. Arrow Lake is all new, though, and it is on a new process. It has many new features, including backside power delivery and gate-all-around (GAA) RibbonFET transistors, so it's a watershed product for Intel. The company is reportedly planning on first discussing Arrow Lake at the upcoming Computex trade show in Taipei, which starts on June 4.