Intel’s 14th Gen Meteor Lake processors are restricted to the premium notebook market. The Raptor Lake Refresh will cater to the DIY segment as a stopgap till the 15th Gen Arrow Lake-S CPUs launch in late 2025. The various “PL1,” “PL2,” and “PL4” power limits of these chips have leaked out in the form of next-gen MiniPC power guidelines. Before moving on, a quick primer on Arrow Lake. While 14th Gen Meteor Lake was a “Tick,” 15th Gen Arrow Lake will be a mix of “Tick” and “Tock”.
Let’s look at the leaked power values, courtesy of Darkmont. The 15th Gen Arrow Lake-S platform will have a base or PL1 limit of 125W. This is the same as the existing 12th and 13th Gen K-series parts. The “PL2” or Boost Clock power limit of the Core i9-15900K has been reduced to 177W, a 43% reduction compared to the 13900K (253W). Considering that the 20A process is two nodes ahead of Intel 7, it’s not hard to believe.
The PL4 power limit (absolute max power allowed momentarily) has been reduced to 333W, a 26% reduction gen-on-gen versus the 13900K (420W). AMD’s AM5 platform has a TDP of 170W and a peak PPT of 230W. Since these power recommendations are for a mini-PC, it’s fair to assume they’ll be lower than the stock values.
However, seeing how the NUC 13 Extreme features the full TDP range of the Core i9-13900K, these values are likely the same as the stock desktop recommendations.
Arrow Lake will be a desktop-centric platform with up to 24 cores (8P and 16E) based on the LGA1851 socket and 800-series chipsets. The compute or CPU tile will be fabbed on Intel’s 2nm-class 20A node, while the SoC, I/O, and GPU tiles will be retained from Meteor. Arrow Lake will leverage a modular “chiplet” design with five disaggregated dies fabbed across multiple process nodes (TSMC N6, N4, Intel 16).
In addition to the node shrink and platform upgrades, the 15th Gen family will introduce new core architectures, too. The “Redwood Cove” P-core will be succeeded by Lion Cove, while the “Crestmont” E-core will be replaced by Skymont. Unlike their predecessors, these microarchitectures will come with major IPC uplifts.
