Intel officially unveiled their next laptop processor line, Lunar Lake, in June, though we'd known about the next-gen CPUs for a few months. The company has yet to make any announcements about the desktop version.
A new leak on X spotted by GSMArena claims that desktop processors will be dubbed Arrow Lake and are expected to be revealed on October 10.
When Intel announced the Meteor Lake successor chips, they made compelling changes to their CPUs. For one, the new laptop processors massively bumped the TOPs (Trillion Operations Per Second) from 11.5 to 48. Microsoft requires any Copilot + PCs to meet a minimum of 40 TOPs, which is why we saw a lot of ARM-based laptops announced during Microsoft's Build event in May.
Intel claimed that the new chips would be at least 60% more battery efficient and that Lunar Lake would power at least 80 laptops.
Interestingly, Intel dropped HyperThreading in Lunar Lake processors, which the company claimed is faster and more efficient. If you're out of the loop, HyperThreading is a feature created by Intel that enables a single processor to act like multiple virtual ones. According to the Arrow Lake leak, the desktop version will also forgo HyperThreading.
However, looking at the tables from X user jaykihn0, hyperthreading may not be necessary as the efficiency cores appear far more robust than previous Intel chips. However, despite Intel's claims, it seems to be a bit more of an energy monster. We'll test that whenever we get an Arrow Lake-powered desktop to test.
There will be 14 models under the Intel Core Ultra brand with a mixture of performance and efficiency cores. They also range in wattage for TDP from 35W to 125W.
All the chips appear to have Turbo Boost Technology 2.0, which slightly boosts a single performance core. Several other aspects, including Thermal Velocity Boost, appear to be getting upgrades. We recommend looking at the tables from the X leak, which breaks it down in much more granular detail.
A separate leak shared by Extreme Tech spotted a GeekBench listing, which appears to show an Arrow Lake benchmark. The GeekBench test shows a single-core score of 3,219 and a multi-core score of 19,433. The tested Arrow Lake processor is claimed to be a Core Ultra 7 265KF. By comparison, the Raptor Lake Core i7-14700KF has scores of 3,006 and 19,614.
It seems to confirm that a lack of HyperThreading won't hinder the new chips, but the boost appears negligible. However, it is supposed to be a new socket and tile-based design, so we don't know what exactly Intel will be able to pull out of these chips.
And, to be cautious, this is one benchmark of one chip. It's not extremely exciting, but we'll know more as more chipsets are tested and more benchmarks are revealed.
Intel has not had a great summer between recent layoffs that saw R&D budgets destroyed and Qualcomm basically owning the new AI PC market with Snapdragon X chips.
And that's before you get to the ongoing issues with the Raptor Lake chipsets. Supposedly, the next generation of Intel chips is not susceptible to the oxidation issues affecting the 13th and 14th generations of Intel chips. Despite releasing a fix last month, several Intel owners are stuck with permanently damaged or degraded chips. Time will tell if the Lunar/Arrow Lake chips will avoid these issues.
