Intel Z890 Motherboards To Feature Native Thunderbolt 4 Support, Arrow Lake Desktop CPUs With Up To 4 “Arc Xe-LPG” iGPU Cores

05.05.2024 - 13:29 / wccftech.com / Lake S.Desktop / Meteor Lake / Hassan Mujtaba

More details regarding the Intel Arrow Lake-S Desktop CPU platform and the Z890 motherboards have been revealed.

Intel Arrow Lake-S Desktop CPUs To Feature Half The iGPU "Xe-LPG" Cores As Meteor Lake, Get Native Thunderbolt 4 Support on Z890 Motherboards

Details regarding Intel's Arrow Lake-S "Core Ultra 200" Desktop CPUs and the respective 800-series platform are starting to take shape. The latest information comes from Golden Pig Upgrade who is talking about the SKUs, the iGPU configurations, and the top Z890 chipset.

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Starting with the SKUs, the Intel Core Ultra 200 "Arrow Lake-S" Desktop CPUs will be following the first-gen Core Ultra 100 "Meteor Lake" family and start at Core Ultra 5. We have detailed the three possible "Unlocked" SKUs which include the Core Ultra 9 285K, Core Ultra 7 265K, and Core Ultra 5 245K in a previous report here.

It looks like the lineup won't include Core Ultra 3 chips and Intel is likely to keep on selling and refreshing existing Core i3 CPUs to make up for the entry-level demand which is lower than what it seems to be despite having entry-level prices. Intel might offer a refresh with entry-level SKUs on existing LGA 1700 platforms such as the upcoming Bartlett Lake-S Desktop chips.

In terms of iGPU configurations, the Intel Arrow Lake-S "Core Ultra 200" Desktop CPUs will max out at 4 Xe-Cores based on the Alchemist Xe-LPG graphics architecture. These are half the cores versus the top Intel Core Ultra 9 "Meteor Lake" CPUs and certain SKUs are expected to feature 3 and 2 Xe-cores too. If you want to see how these iGPUs perform, you can look into the performance tests of Intel Core Ultra 7 165U/155U for reference as they also come with 4 Xe-core iGPUs.

The clock speed should be higher on the desktop chips due to higher TDPs and should provide decent performance but don't expect a lot. They would certainly not be able to match the top AMD Ryzen 8000G APUs as those already offer competitive and sometimes, even faster, performance than the Meteor Lake top dies with 8 Xe-cores as we tested here.

As for the cache, it looks like we have another leaker who has pointed out up to 3 MB L3 cache per Lion Cove P-Core. MebiuW suggests that the Lion Cove P-Core will feature a 3 MB L3 cache while the Skymont E-Core cluster comprising of 4 E-Cores will feature 3 MB of L3 cache. This brings the total cache to 36 MB for the top 24 core CPUs (Core Ultra 9 285K), 33 MB for the 20 core CPUs (Core Ultra 7 265K), and 24 MB cache for the 6+8 core configurations.

Intel Arrow Lake-S Desktop CPU Lineup (Preliminary):