After rumors, die shot and performance leaks, and of course endless speculation, Intel has officially revealed their next three CPU product lines set to replace Meteor Lake at their Intel Innovation 2023 conference which just opened its virtual doors a few hours ago. The no longer celestially named Arrow, Panther and Lunar lake (okay they couldn’t resist on that last one) CPUs are of course the big announcements to care about for those of us who want to see how many potatoes we can collect in Starfield before the game crashes.
First in line is Arrow Lake, a 20A process node which is expected (according to Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger) to hit the market sometime in fall 2024. The chip will begin fabrication early next year and will reportedly bring improvements to power, performance and die size. Arrow Lake is going to be Intel’s “next-gen” (or I suppose it’s next-next gen-given Meteor Lake isn’t even out yet) gaming CPU and will most likely be the one to buy for those “all or nothing” gaming PC builds. On that note, if you are in the market for a PC upgrade, feel free to check out my best gaming PC components of 2023 guide.
In addition, we’ve been given a peak at the Lunar Lake CPU family as well, these “slightly” humbler chips will pretty much exclusively target mobile platforms (so phones and other small portable devices that need processing power). However, what is cool to see with Lunar Lake is the inclusion of the new Battlemage cores, these are iGPU cores that can push impressive (for its type) graphics, has excellent video encoding support, and perhaps most importantly, show that Intel isn’t just kidding around in the GPU market and intend to remain a relevant player for years to come, giving gamers a much needed third competitor in the space.
Lastly, we’ve got the Panther Lake lineup, which will be the 2025 follow up to Arrow Lake, as this is still two generations down the line Intel was understandably less forthcoming with details about Panther Lake, but we have got a few clues. First, it will feature “Cougar Cove P-Cores” which is expected to dramatically increase single-threaded performance by 30-40% and marginally multi-threaded performance by 10-15%. Second it is expected to feature a paired down version of the Xe3 GPU architecture, the “followup” to Battlemage. Sadly, it’s all a bit code-namely for now and not much is known about expected performance but suffice to say it’ll likely be similar to current onboard graphics on high end Intel CPU’s…but you know…better.
I’ll be sure to follow up in the future once more details are revealed, so stay tuned.
