A mysterious new CPU from the forthcoming Intel Arrow Lake lineup has just surfaced in a leaked CPU-Z screenshot, revealing a few details about the new processor. As with many other rumors about the forthcoming new Intel gaming CPU range, the screenshot clearly shows the Core Ultra branding, and this leak also reveals the clock speed of the chip.
Intel is expected to release its new Arrow Lake chips before the end of 2024, but it's going to have to fight AMD for the best gaming CPU title. By this time, AMD will not only have released its first Zen 5 CPUs, but it's also expected to have its first Ryzen 9000X3D chips out the door.
The CPU in the screenshot has "(ES)" after its name, which means its an Intel engineering sample, and as such it's not representative of the final silicon that will be available to buy at retail. Several of the key specs in the screenshot, which was revealed in an X (formerly Twitter) post by tech leaker wxnod, have also been blocked out by blue scribbles, presumably to protect the leaker's identity. We can glean a few details, though.
Firstly, this CPU has a maximum TDP of 125W and has a K suffix at the end of its model number, meaning it will be one of Intel's CPUs with unlocked multiplier, so you can overclock its P-Cores. The clock speeds are also revealed, with the chip running at 5GHz using a 50x multiplier.
The latter is shown as being able to vary from 4x to at least 50x, but the figure after "5" has been scribbled out, so we don't know the maximum figure - if it tops out at 50x (5GHz), though, then that's a comparatively low clock speed for a K-series Intel CPU - even the Core i5 14600K can boost to 5.3GHz.
Intel Arrow Lake clock speeds are rumored to be lower than those of 14th-gen CPUs, such as the Core i9 14900K, with the top-end Core Ultra 9 285K rumored to be topping out at a 5.7GHz boost clock. The CPU in the screenshot is also shown to have the Arrow Lake codename and use the LGA1851 socket, as used on the reportedly forthcoming Intel Z890 motherboard chipset.
Interestingly, CPU-Z also detects the manufacturing process as just 7nm, but other commentators have already jumped on this point. "It's just CPU-Z being dumb, ARL [Arrow Lake] doesn't use 7nm for anything," claims regular tech leaker Kepler_L2.
The CPU-Z screenshot also reveals the cache structure, with 48KB of L1 data cache per P-Core, and 32KB per E-Core, while both the P-Cores and E-Cores each get 64KB of L1 instruction cache. That's a slight difference from Intel's Raptor Lake CPUs, which only have 32KB of L1 instruction cache per P-Core. Meanwhile, the P-Cores' L2 cache has also gone up from 2MB per core to 3MB compared to Raptor Lake. There's also a shared L3 cache between all the cores, but the total figure has been scribbled out.
If you're thinking of assembling a new rig based on Intel or AMD's new gaming CPUs later this year, check out our full guide on how to build a gaming PC, where we take you through the whole process step by step.
