It's safe to say that everyone in the PC Gamer office was somewhat disappointed with Intel's 14th-generation desktop Core CPUs. It's certainly as fast as we wanted it to be, but it's only a few percent better than the previous generation, and it's still power hungry and hot. That's to be expected, though, given that it's not a new architecture. What we're waiting to see is what the real successor, Arrow Lake, will look like, and the first hints of it have been revealed: basically, it's like a Raptor version of Meteor Lake. Oh.

Well, this according to a relatively old Intel document leaked at X (via Wccftech). The document details the pre-alpha Arrow Lake (ARL-S) processor and the motherboard sockets and chipsets that will be used. Being pre-alpha means that it is a very early engineering sample, and as such, the document states that sample issues should be used with the P core disabled.

However, there is still much that is interesting. For example, the desktop chip has 8 P-cores, 16 E-cores, and 1 Low Power E-core, written in the short form 8+16+1. Arrow Lake, like Meteor Lake, will have a tiled structure, the largest of which is 6 P-cores, 8 E-cores, 2 LP E-cores.

What is immediately noticeable, however, is that the new P-cores are listed as "8 IA cores/8 threads," meaning that Intel may remove support for hyperthreading. This feature allows one core to handle two threads at a time, but not in parallel. Threads are not executed in all stages at once, so ideally they can be assigned to different threads.

The last time Intel did this was with the 9th generation Core chips (Coffee Lake), when the i7 9700K and i9 9900K both had 8 cores, but only the latter had hyperthreading, which supported twice the number of threads

All ArcArms were equipped with the same number of cores.

There is no indication that all Arrow Lake CPUs will be like this, but Intel has patented a technology it calls Rentable Units. It scans threads and checks the relative workload of the instruction list. Then the ones with high workloads are sent to the P core and the easy ones to the E core. Basically, it's a thread scheduler, but a much more advanced one than current Intel chips.

This pre-alpha processor has the same 125W TDP/PL1 as today's top-of-the-line Core chips, but nothing about PL2, or the maximum power limit that can be maintained for some time. This is much more important than the base level, which for the i9 14900K could go up to 250W or more.

Reading between the lines, Arrow Lake looks more like a Raptorized version of Meteor Lake, but previous rumors suggest that the 15th generation Core chips will still be quite robust, with 3MB of L2 cache per P-core and up to 32 E-cores configuration

We also got a sneak peek at the Arrow Lake socket and 800 series motherboard chipsets. The former will use the LGA-1851 format (the current one is LGA-1700) and support up to DDR5-6400, with DDR4 being dropped entirely. This is a significant increase in memory speed, as 14th generation CPUs only support up to DDR5-5600 by default.

Additionally, the number of PCIe lanes on the CPU and chipset has also been improved. The 14th generation will have 16 PCIe 5.0 for graphics slots, the same four PCIe 5.0 for NVMe storage, and four PCIe 4.0 lanes (possibly also for SSDs) for a total of 24 lanes. Motherboards with the upcoming 800 series chipset will have up to 24 PCIe 4.0 lanes, 8 of which will be reserved for M.2 drives.

The remainder are for other devices, such as expansion cards in PCIe x4 or x1 slots.USB4 support is provided by up to 10 USB 3.2 Gen 2x1 ports, which can be integrated into up to four Gen 2x2 ports. There's also a little love for monitors, with DisplayPort 2.0 (UHBR20 mode), HDMI 2.1, and Thunderbolt 4 in the mix. [It's too early to know what the final Arrow Lake specs will look like, but the improved memory controller and significantly revised motherboard chipset are very encouraging. I can't imagine any of this will be cheap, but if AMD's Zen 5 is introduced around the same time, a nice price war could really come in handy.