Core Ultra 200S: This is what Intel's new desktop CPUs look like under the hood
The Arrow Lake processors are not even on the market yet, but the first one has already been beheaded. It is Intel's first tile design for desktop PCs.
(Image: heise online / mma)
Intel's desktop processors from the Core Ultra 200S (Arrow Lake) series consist of a total of seven tiles. Six of them are visible, but two without exposed structures. Most of them come from the chip contract manufacturer TSMC – and not from Intel's own chip production (Intel Foundry).
The X account "Madness727" has "decapitated" a Core Ultra 9 285K, i.e. removed the copper heatspreader and revealed the underlying chiplets – called Tiles by Intel. "highyieldyt" provides a version with labels and various commentators estimate the tile sizes. Arrow Lake is Intel's first CPU generation to bring the multi-chiplet/tile design to desktop PCs. For notebooks, there was already one at the end of 2023 with Meteor Lake (Core Ultra 100). AMD has been using multi-chiplet designs since 2019 (Ryzen 3000).
New and old technology combined
Arrow Lake inherits several components from Meteor Lake: Intel is likely to have adopted the elongated GPU tile with a chip area of just under 23 mm² one-to-one. It mainly contains four Xe cores (512 shaders), still without the Xe Matrix Extensions (XMX) for AI acceleration, as found in the Core Ultra 200V (Lunar Lake) notebook processors.
(Image:Â Intel)
At a good 86 mm², the SoC tile is slightly smaller than that of Meteor Lake, but uses almost identical technology. Essentially, Arrow Lake lacks the two particularly energy-saving low-power e-cores. The remaining components, including the small AI unit, memory controller and display and media engine, remain the same. At 13 trillion INT8 operations per second (TOPS), the AI unit is quite leisurely – not enough for Microsoft's Copilot+ (at least 40 TOPS).
The compute tile with eight performance and 16 efficiency cores is entirely new. With around 115 mm² and TSMC's first 3-nanometer production generation N3B, it is likely to be the most expensive component on the Arrow Lake CPUs. The SoC tile – as well as the I/O chiplet for Thunderbolt, the Wi-Fi 7 logic and PCI Express – use the inexpensive N6 manufacturing technology. TSMC manufactures the GPU using the 5 nm N5 process.
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Silicon dummies for stabilization
Two filler elements made of unexposed silicon are used for stabilization and uniform contact pressure. Intel already used a single filler in Lunar Lake. The only exposed component from the Intel Foundry is the lower base tile with 22 nm technology, through which the lines of the upper tiles run.
Intel will launch the Arrow Lake processors on October 24: the Core Ultra 9 285K, Core Ultra 7 265K and Core Ultra 5 245K as well as their F versions without GPU.
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(mma)
