Performance projections leaked to "Igor's Lab" reveal what Intel's internal expectations are for the next two processor generations. The numbers highlight that the 2024 Arrow Lack CPUs will offer up to a 21% performance increase over current 13th generation CPUs, as well as significant improvements in gaming and graphics performance.

However, the upcoming Raptor Lake refresh, or 14th generation Intel desktop processor, does not look that impressive in comparison. At best, it is a 4% improvement.

When tested against the Core i9 13900K as a baseline, next year's Arrow Lake chip not only was 21% faster overall in integer and floating point benchmarks, but also beat its predecessor in 3DMark Time Spy with nearly double the iGPU performance.

That's a significant performance boost for an Arrow Lake tiled GPU, but as with the Core i9 13900K that came before it, this chip is not gaming specific; doubling the Time Spy numbers on the UHD 770 brings it to around the 2,000 mark, which is about the same as the latest This is about two-thirds the performance of AMD's impressive Radeon 780M GPU in the Ryzen 7 7840U, which is used in the latest gaming handhelds.

Nevertheless, Arrow Lake's iGPU performance is quite spicy, with a 240% increase over Raptor Lake.

Along with these performance numbers, it turns out that the upcoming Arrow Lake-S and Lunar Lake chips will support some important instructions, including a particularly interesting extension for bashing the kind of computation needed to run fairly powerful AI applications The following is a summary of the results of the study. We expect a significant focus on neural networking, along with impressive improvements in efficiency, security, and overall performance in the upcoming chips, including a refresh of Raptor Lake.

The expected 24-core (8 P-cores, 16 E-cores) chip will utilize SHA512, SM3, and SM4 instructions for enhanced security and encryption, as well as AVX-VNNI-INT16 features to improve speed and efficiency for AI workloads. This is according to Intel's Architecture Information Sheet (PDF alert) found on the video card.

The latter AVX-VNNI instruction improves the chip's capabilities with respect to inference tasks such as those found in AI applications through its ability to perform specialized 8-bit and 16-bit integer tasks.

While we knew that Arrow and Lunar Lake would offer different QoL capabilities, Intel touted Lunar as the performance-per-watt leader, giving the impression that it was likely to be a mobile-first chip. [It is the first to switch from a classic FinFET transistor design to a RibbonFET, or gate-all-around (GAA) design. It is designed to simplify wiring and may offer unique performance gains.

Lunar Lake should then appear in late 2024 or late 2025 on the newer and even smaller Intel 18A process. According to Intel, the roadmap is six months ahead of schedule, with a release date likely in late 2024. So by the end of next year, when a refreshed version of Raptor Lake is expected to hit store shelves later this year, we should see some intense AI-centric chips.