We’ve just had our first glimpse of what’s purported to be the insides of a new Intel Arrow Lake CPU, as a picture of a new 24-core Intel CPU has leaked online. The image shows several dies, or tiles as Intel calls them, making up the overall design, with the largest section apparently going to traditional CPU cores.
Intel needs its forthcoming Arrow Lake CPUs to be really competitive, as its current desktop CPUs are all based on its aging Raptor Lake architecture. Thanks to high clock speeds, that’s still enough for the Core i9 14900K to get onto our best gaming CPU guide, but AMD is quickly expected to steal the whole show when Zen 5 launches later this year.
This latest leak comes from YouTuber Moore’s Law is Dead (MLID), who showed an image of the CPU tile structure in an Arrow Lake CPU in the video below. According to MLID, the pictured CPU is an Arrow Lake-H extreme laptop chip, but he also states that he expects the pictured compute tile to “be the same CPU compute tile that will be used on desktop Arrow Lake.”
Like Intel’s Meteor Lake laptop CPUs, the image shows Intel’s new tile approach in action, where the CPU is broken up into several different dies. In Meteor Lake, this means you get a compute tile containing the main CPU cores, along with a GPU tile, an IO tile, and a SoC tile. The latter contains Intel’s AI hardware, as well as some very low-power E-cores to manage multi-threaded work without drawing too much power.
After talking to his various sources, MLID has come up with the diagram above, showing the various dies’ different jobs, and says “I do believe this likely shares the exact same SoC tile that Meteor Lake used.” Meanwhile, the GPU section looks smaller than those on Meteor Lake CPUs (not an issue if your extreme laptop has a discrete GPU), while the compute tile in the bottom right is longer and larger than the ones on Meteor Lake. Interestingly, it looks as though there are also two “dummy” tiles in two corners of the package to maintain a consistent level across the full rectangle of the chip.
Intel’s Arrow Lake CPUs are being made by TSMC on its 3nm N3B process, marking the first time the company’s desktop CPUs will be made on a process smaller than 10nm, and it looks as though Intel is taking advantage of those small transistors to pack loads of processing power into Arrow Lake. However, it’s going to have some tough competition, as the AMD Zen 5 release date is reportedly coming earlier than expected.
In the meantime, if you’re looking for a new Intel CPU, make sure you check out our Core i5 14600K review, as well as our guide on how to build a gaming PC if you’re thinking of putting together a new rig.