Intel's Arrow Lake will be the world's first gaming processors with AI accelerators

At CES 2024, Intel announced that its Arrow Lake processors for desktops and Lunar Lake for laptops will launch in the second half of this year. Arrow Lake will be the successor to the Meteor Lake lineup, and will be aimed largely at gamers, with Intel claiming that it will offer the "world's first gaming CPU with AI accelerator." The company did not announce anything else about its 15th-gen Core desktop processors, but various leaks over the past several weeks have already revealed a few key details about them.

First off, Arrow Lake won't be exclusive to desktops, but should come to laptops as well. On desktops, they are expected to use the LGA 1851 socket, and could be marketed under the Core Ultra Series 2 branding. On the CPU side, they will include Lion Cove Performance cores and a mixture of Skymont and Crestmont Efficient cores, while an Alchemist+ Xe-LPG+ chip will account for the integrated graphics. As for the AI accelerators in the NPU, that could bring enhanced capabilities hitherto unseen in mainstream desktop processors.

For those interested in chip design, Arrow Lake processors will house the compute, graphics, and IO tiles with the Foveros packaging system, which involves stacking all the tiles vertically rather than side-by-side, reducing the footprint while optimizing the cost and improving power efficiency.

As for the Lunar Lake lineup, Intel said that it will come with a "radically new low-power architecture and significant IPC improvements" (via Tom's Hardware). The company also claimed that these chips will offer thrice as much AI performance as Meteor Lake on both the GPU and NPU side. According to prior reports, Lunar Lake will come with a hybrid core architecture that will include Lion Cove P-cores and Skymont E-cores. On the GPU side, it is tipped to come with Battlemage (Xe2-LPG) graphics architecture with 64 Execution Units (EUs).