Everything you need to know

On October 12, 2024By Yukito

Intel will launch its Arrow Lake series of chips on October 24. As part of the announcement, the company shared some details about the upcoming products.

Firstly, this series is very focused on improving performance, enabling better cooling and reducing power consumption.

Several significant design changes have also been introduced to eliminate the problem of processor bending.

Intel’s Arrow Lake is set to hit the market in two weeks (October 24), and the company has revealed some interesting information that’s worth checking out before we see something real.

While we can’t vouch for all the claims until we test it ourselves, below is a detailed summary of what Intel is saying about its new series of processors.

About the new chip

Intel’s flagship Arrow Lake processor is the Core Ultra 9 285K. It’s immediately visible Intel decided to change its name. Instead of using the usual naming scheme of 13th, 14th, 15th generation, etc., this model is called “Core Ultra 9 285K”.

Here are some of its basic specifications:

Total number of cores: 24 (8 P cores and 16 E cores)

P-Core Max Turbo Clock: 5.5GHz

Maximum turbo power: 250 W

PCIe lanes: 24

Declared NPU performance: 13 TOPS

Memory support: Dual-channel DDR5 6400 MT/s memory, up to 192 GB

What’s new?

Many things feel fresh in this exciting new series of chips. Here are some of our favorites:

Unlike the previous tokens, this one has no hyper-threading. Instead, it has a single-threaded architecture to increase clock speeds. Many users think that the number of threads has something to do with performance, but this is not true. It all depends on how it is constructed.

The company has tightly the focus was on performance and energy consumption in this model and claims to have halved power consumption (compared to 4900k) while maintaining performance. It also keeps the temperature up to 10°C lower during active gaming.

Instead of the traditional single-chip structure, it has multi-level structure consisting of 6 individual tokens. At the bottom is the base tile, then the compute tile, the filler tile, the I/O tile, the SOC tile, the GPU tile, and at the top is the IHS. This multi-level structure allows for more refined tuning.

It is equipped with a DLVR (Digital Linear Voltage Regulator) bypass. Traditionally, core voltage is supplied directly to the processor. However, in this chip it goes through the DLVR. It helps regulate voltage and reduce voltage ripplewhich in turn reduces energy consumption. There is also a DLVR bypass option if you want to disable it.

A more detailed core clock system ensures this is possible it’s easy to hit the sweet spot when overclocking. With an upper limit of 16.67 MHz, you can now maximize performance without compromising stability.

Does this really eliminate CPU flexing?

Intel says its new series of chips solves the CPU flex problem. In case you’re wondering, CPU flex happens when the CPU can’t make proper contact with the socket, leading to stability issues.

To fix this, Intel has increased the thickness of the PCB and made the IHS longer and narrower. Two sockets have also been introduced. The first is a regular ILM slot, the second is a reduced ILM slot. It comes with an additional plastic strip that increases height, reduces strain and prevents the CPU from bending.

Ideally, this problem could be solved in a better way. However, in testing it was found that elevation helped. The first socket causes a bend of 70 micrometers, while the second reduces it to 45 micrometers.

If everything else Intel has promised is indeed true, then Intel Arrow Lake is undoubtedly something worth waiting for. However, as with all technical issues, we won’t know for sure until after launch.

querin