Intel is planning to launch its first tile-based desktop processor later this year with its Arrow Lake architecture. It will launch both as a desktop CPU and as a high-powered mobile part, which will be called Arrow Lake-H, as opposed to Arrow Lake-S for desktop. Now, the mobile version has either been photographed or rendered, giving us the first glimpse at what it could look like. It appears to be a very early engineering sample, as dummy tiles are included to maintain the integrity of the package.
The pictured die is essentially a desktop CPU cut down for mobile usage, similar to Intel's existing HX Raptor Lake processors. YouTuber Moore's Law is Dead (MLID) has shown off the mysterious die in his latest video, via Videocardz, which he says involved removing certain markings from the photo to conceal his sources. The most apparent change from its existing Meteor Lake tile-based CPU is that the compute tile is much longer now and seems almost twice as big as the compute tile in Meteor Lake. It allegedly features eight performance and 16 efficiency cores, for 24 cores total, as hyper-threading is no longer offered. At the same time, the SoC tile is still quite large and possibly unchanged from Meteor Lake, but it has been relocated on the package.
What appears to have happened is that Intel wanted to use a much bigger and longer CPU tile, so it shifted the SoC tile below it while wedging the same I/O tile from Meteor Lake next to it. The graphics tile is also much smaller than the one on Meteor Lake, and it's been shifted from the top of the package to the bottom. The reason for that is this Arrow Lake-H chip will be offered in laptops with discrete graphics. It doesn't need a lot of iGPU horsepower, so a smaller graphics tile makes sense. To fill out the top of the tiles, Intel has added two dummy tiles to keep the top uniform.
What's curious about this photograph is it's been reported that TSMC has tapped TSMC's 3nm node for this compute tile and will use its own Intel 20A process for Core i5 and below. That means that both Intel and AMD will use similar TSMC nodes for their next-generation architectures, so it'll be an interesting head-to-head battle of chip design between the two companies. MLID says Intel's oversized compute die is likely roughly the same size as two Zen 5 CCD chiplets and will probably offer similar performance. If Intel dominates, it'll be down to decisions it made long ago about its revamped architecture.
