Intel's Arrow Lake-S processors will be officially commercially available on October 24, 2024, as was previously said in connection with the announcement, which means that the Raptor Lake Refresh models will not be able to occupy a place at the top of the range for much longer. There will be only five new products in the first round, and all of them will be put on store shelves in a double-lock-free version, and they will all be based on the same Arrow Lake-S chip, but the amount of resources that can be exploited varies from one chip to another. Of course, the new processors have already reached the testers, so on the aforementioned day not only will commercial distribution begin, but the first independent tests will also be published, of course in sufficient detail, so it becomes clear what Intel engineers have created.
One of our testers, who goes by the alias Madness727, shared some interesting images of one of the Arrow Lake-S processors a few days ago, but he did not reveal exactly which model is in the images. Given the above, this doesn't actually matter – there's a good chance it's the Core Ultra 9 285K, as the top model is usually handed to the majority of testers. Anyway, based on the photo, it was possible to “scalp” the new processor without damage, which can be good news for extreme tuners. Unfortunately, the exact material underneath the integrated heat distribution cover that ensures efficient heat transfer between the chip and the cover has not been revealed – it could be simple paste, liquid metal, or even solder.
In the case of the Scalp processor, the Arrow Lake-S core chip, which consists of five parts in total, as mentioned in our previous article, is very well visible. This includes a CPU chip with 16 E-Core and 8 P-Core cores, a GPU chip with 4 Xe cores, and an I/O chip, which, among other things, also hides the integrated Thunderbolt 4 controller. You can read more details about the microstructure of each tile here.
The new processors now have an LGA-1851 shell, so a new motherboard will be needed alongside them, and costs will also increase due to the fact that memory replacement will also be required if we want to switch from the configuration with DDR4 system memory to the Arrow Lake-S-based platform, Since the latter only deals with DDR5 memory modules.
After the “K” and “KF” models of the Arrow Lake-S generation, in the first quarter of next year, the cheaper, multi-locked version will also appear, which will be accompanied by more cost-effective motherboards. At the same time, Arrow Lake is also offered on the mobile front, namely in the form of Arrow Lake-H, which comes in a different configuration compared to the desktop models. The Arrow Lake-H models can only work with 6 P-Cores and 8 E-Cores, but the iGPU will be larger, having 8 Xe cores instead of 4. A smaller CPU board and a larger iGPU board are accompanied by With a smaller I/O board, because on the mobile interface, a large number of I/O resources will not be needed as on the classic desktop platform.
