Last week, Intel gave us a look at what they plan to deliver over the coming years, confirming some CPU architectures such as Meteor Lake and its successor, Arrow Lake. We've already heard a few rumours about it, including CPU core and iGPU Execution Unit (EU) counts, but a newly leaked roadmap now somewhat confirms what we've learned.
The roadmap was shared by AdoredTV, the same leaker who revealed that Arrow Lake would feature up to 6x P-cores, 8x E-cores and up to 320 EUs in the iGPU. These specifications alone are quite promising, but it's hard to grasp what kind of performance we can expect from it.
It wasn't a rumour, it was their plan. I talked with Intel engineers working on the project and I was also handed this slide a bit before then. If they are no longer doing TSMC 3nm its a decision made since the video. pic.twitter.com/zr0FojtCv6
— Jim (@AdoredTV) February 22, 2022
Fortunately for us, the roadmap unveils Intel's performance target for Arrow Lake: match Apple's 14-inch premium laptop. Moreover, the slide confirms that the external N3 node mentioned in Intel's official roadmap from last week seems to be the TSMC N3 node.
In the roadmap, you can also see the development of the upcoming architecture, which should start to be tested in Q4 2022 with the first engineering sample. The ES2 are planned for Q1 2023, while the qualification samples should appear in Q3 2023. Intel Arrow Lake-powered laptops will start releasing in 2024.
KitGuru says: Intel chips may offer more performance than Apple M chips, but the latter still reigns supreme in terms of efficiency and integrated graphics. That might change once Arrow Lake-P releases.