Long-time PC hardware leaker Golden Pig Upgrade has made a slew of predictions for Intel's upcoming Arrow Lake CPUs (via VideoCardz). Some of the claims are easy to believe, such as Arrow Lake lacking support for DDR4 and only having the weakest iGPU that's currently paired with current-generation Meteor Lake chips. However, Golden Pig Upgrade also says Arrow Lake won't have hyper-threading, and most models won't be made at Intel; instead, they rely on TSMC's processes.
The leaker's Bilibili post is written in Chinese, and since the standard Google-translated text actually leaves out the part about hyper-threading entirely, we'll be relying on VideoCardz's translation. Golden Pig Upgrade makes eight individual claims about Arrow Lake, ranging from unsurprising to almost contradictory to what we thought we knew.
Five of these claims are pretty easy to believe: Arrow Lake will be branded Series 2, it won't support DDR4, it doesn't have low-power E-cores, it only has four Xe cores, and the higher-end SKUs won't be PCH-free. We already knew that Intel's old Gen branding was done away with and that Meteor Lake doesn't support DDR4, so that's par for the course. Turning off the low-power E-cores also makes sense because they aren't that useful for high-power CPUs. Arrow Lake will also seemingly come with the four-core GPU tile that low-end Meteor Lake models use.
Two of the remaining three predictions raise eyebrows: The leaker says that Arrow Lake has no hyper-threading and that its NPU performs the same as Meteor Lake's. We've seen leaked Arrow Lake CPUs without hyper-threading before, but as these are engineering samples, hyper-threading may be turned off for stability or testing purposes. There have been rumors that Intel will retire hyper-threading, but typically from sources with poor track records. In contrast, Golden Pig Upgrade has an excellent track record. The claim that the NPU isn't just the same as Meteor Lake's but performs the same would seem contradictory. Intel says Arrow Lake triples AI performance, though perhaps that's only for specific CPUs or refers to GPU improvements.
The final and most interesting claim from Golden Pig Upgrade is that Intel's 20A node will only be used for midrange Arrow Lake compute tiles with six P-cores and eight E-cores. It's hard to tell if the leaker means this specifically for mobile CPUs or if this also applies to desktop models, but either way, it's a big assertion. Given how much Intel has touted 20A and its introduction of PowerVia backside power delivery and RibbonFETs, it's hard to imagine Intel won't utilize it for most of the Arrow Lake lineup. The leaker also didn't mention what TSMC node Intel would use, though perhaps we're supposed to infer it's 3nm.
On the other hand, it's rumored that Intel will rely on TSMC's 3nm process for Lunar Lake MX, though this is seemingly a variant of Lunar Lake. Additionally, slides from Intel indicate that there isn't that much capacity for 20A and 18A chips in 2024 or 2025, so if this rumor is true, then perhaps it's just because of supply issues. Still, it would be very surprising if the CPU that's supposed to return Intel to node leadership is largely powered by TSMC, even if that only applies to the lower-end mobile SKUs.
