Intel’s “14th generation” of CPUs was a refresh of the 13th-gen Raptor Lake architecture, slightly boosting speeds across the board, with the i7 also getting an increase in cores. Independent reviewers and your average consumer were not impressed by this launch, with the performance gains over the previous gen barely worth mentioning. If you are in the market for the best gaming CPU, you are spoilt for choice but you may want to hold off for another year for the proposed Intel 15th gen release. Intel’s 15th gen is still shrouded in mystery, with few leaks and a couple of rumors floating around. Intel’s 15th gen processors were half mentioned at the Intel Innovation event back in September, codenamed Arrow Lake, and would supposedly feature a die shrink.
What do we know about Arrow Lake so far?
The short answer here is – not a lot. Arrow Lake has been displayed on Intel’s roadmaps a few times, showing it to be the successor of Intel 14th gen, and Meteor Lake. One thing we know for sure is that Arrow Lake will be on Intel 20a processor technology, with further improvements in performance and power. According to Wikipedia, TSMC plans to begin 2nm production at the end of 2024, and mass produces in 2025, however, Intel forecasts production in 2024.
Intel 20A will apparently bring “breakthrough innovations in 2024”, a new transistor architecture known as RibbonFET, and PowerVia, an interconnect innovation.
Is there an Intel 15th gen release date?
At the time of writing this, we know there will be a new generation of chips, most likely to follow on from 14th gen, however, when they release is completely unknown. Thanks to some of Intel’s recent presentations, we know they plan to launch Arrow Lake in 2024, however, we can only speculate when that might be.
Going off the 12th (October 27th, 2021), 13th (October 20th, 2022), and 14th generation (October 17th, 2023) launches, along with Intel’s roadmap, we predict the Intel 15th Gen release window to be somewhere between October 1st and December 31st, so Q4 basically. Of course, when browsing the Wiki around TSMC’s 2nm production, we may not see the CPUs until 2025 but we will know more when we enter the new year.
We could see the major SKUs (unconfirmed) release at the end of 2024 – i9-15900K, i7-15700K, i5-15600K, with the rest following in early 2025.
Intel 15th gen socket rumors – new motherboards incoming?
There is very little to go off spec-wise for the Arrow Lake processors aside from the fab process mentioned earlier. It was previously leaked that Intel 15th-gen chips would be using LGA 1851 through 2026, however, the tweet has since been removed. Other than that, we expect “more power and performance” as stated at Intel Innovation, perhaps with more L2 and L3 cache.
In summary
For those that were patient enough to leave 13th and 14th gen processors, 15th-gen it is then? In all seriousness, the CPU market is fantastic at the minute with AMD and Intel both fighting tooth and nail for the consumer. This looks like it is only going to get better and better next year, if only the GPU market could match this level of competition.
