Rumor mill: Intel is expected to launch its Arrow Lake-S desktop CPUs later this year, and a slew of leaks have already revealed some key details about them. A tipster has now seemingly disclosed even more information about the upcoming processors, including their NPU performance and cache configurations.
Arrow Lake-S CPUs will come with a built-in NPU capable of performing 13 trillion operations per second (TOPS) according to a new leak. They are also expected to offer up to 15 CPU TOPS and nine GPU TOPS, totaling 37 TOPS of AI performance.
These numbers are significantly higher than those of the Raptor Lake-S processors, which offer only 11 TOPS of AI performance, including eight CPU TOPS and three GPU TOPS. Raptor Lake CPUs do not have a built-in NPU.
Collection of various small improvements/changes shipping with Arrow Lake -S.
– Jaykihn (@jaykihn0) July 9, 2024
All specifications are "up to", except for TOPS, which may exceed the listed number on the retail product. pic.twitter.com/EyAxyFVZMf
Arrow Lake's rumored 37 TOPS is very similar to the 39 combined TOPS offered by AMD's Hawk Point APUs but falls far behind Strix Point and Lunar Lake, both of which offer upwards of 45 TOPS.
As for the NPU in the Arrow Lake-S CPUs, its 13 TOPS is better than AMD's upcoming Ryzen 9000 lineup, which doesn't have an NPU at all, but falls well short of the 40 TOPS benchmark mandated by Microsoft for its "Copilot+ PC" certification.
In another post, @Jaykihn claimed that Arrow Lake-S and Arrow Lake-HX CPUs will come with a different cache structure than Lunar Lake despite using the same Lion Cove P-Cores and Skymont E-Cores. The upcoming chips will reportedly ship with 3 MB (12-Way) L2 cache per P-Core and 4 MB (16-Way) L2 cache per E-Core cluster, while L3 cache is expected to be 3 MB per P-Core and 3 MB per E-Core cluster.
Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake -S and -HX cache configurations.
– Jaykihn (@jaykihn0) July 9, 2024
LNL provided for comparison's sake. pic.twitter.com/CuqVUXSADM
For reference, Lunar Lake offers 2.5 MB (10-way) of L2 cache per P-Core and the same 4 MB (16-way) L2 cache per E-Core cluster. Lunar Lake chips also feature the same 3 MB L3 cache for the P-Cores, but the LP-E cores do not have dedicated L3 cache.
The tipster also said Intel could release an Arrow Lake Refresh lineup with an NPU upgrade but did not specify whether it will use the latest NPU4 architecture seen in the Lunar Lake CPUs. It is believed that the original Arrow Lake lineup is using an older NPU architecture, which is why it isn't able to match Lunar Lake in terms of NPU performance.