Intel’s 14th Gen Meteor Lake processors are slated to land in the holiday season, followed by the 15th Gen Arrow Lake offerings roughly a year later. While Meteor Lake’s CPU tile is based on Intel’s 4nm-class process node, Arrow Lake will leverage the 20A or 2nm-class lithography. It’ll feature 8 P-cores based on the Lion Cove architecture and 16 cores based on the Skymont core architecture. Two additional LP cores will be included on the SoC for low-power scenarios.
Unfortunately, the 15th Gen Arrow Lake family will feature neither hyper-threading nor any “Rentable Units.” It’ll focus on single-threaded performance with a 25-40% improvement over Raptor Lake. Lunar Lake will be a premium mobile SoC, succeeding Lakefield in 7-15W devices. It’ll feature 4+4+2 cores based on the Lion Cove “P”, Skymont “E”, and LP E-cores.
And then, we have the 16th Gen Arrow Lake Refresh or ARL-R with increased core counts and higher clocks. It’ll feature up to 40 cores (8P + 32E + 2LP), retaining the core architectures of its predecessor. The process node will also remain unchanged. Like the Raptor Lake-R, it’ll offer slightly higher single-threaded performance and vastly improved multi-threaded capabilities. The Arrow Lake Refresh is planned for the second half of 2025.
Panther Lake will land in the first half of 2026 with Cougar Cove “P” and Darkmont “E” cores. The CPU tile will be fabbed on the Intel 18A (1.8nm) node and leverage a 4P + 8E + 4LP core configuration. For better or worse, it won’t use Rentable Units either.
Nova Lake will increase the core count to 48 (16P + 32E +4LP) and adopt Rentable Unit supported P-cores and Arctic Wold E-cores. It will be fabbed on Intel’s 14A (1.4nm) process node. Expect a lofty IPC gain and a massive LLC of up to 144MB or more. Nova Lake is scheduled to launch in the final months of 2026.
