Intel's Arrow Lake processors could give us thin-and-light laptops that blow the MacBook Air away

(Image credit: Intel)

Intel’s Arrow Lake processors are likely to touch down sometime next year - and if the stats from German publication Igor’s Lab are true, we’re expecting some groundbreaking performance leaps from the upcoming processor lineup.

According to an internal performance projections chart obtained by Igor’s Lab, Arrow Lake could be leaps and bounds ahead of the current Raptor Lake. Intel used the flagship Core i9-13900K as a baseline for the projections, directly comparing both Arrow Lake and Raptor Lake Refresh performance scores against the current high-end Core i9 CPU.

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The graph shows significant improvements to multi-core workloads showing that Arrow Lake is 21% faster than the current Raptor Lake flagship CPU, and a whopping 220% to 240% iGPU performance improvement in the 3DMark’s Time Spy and Wild Life Extreme synthetic benchmarks.

Do more with less

This leads us to wonder, what exactly is the point of a ‘refresh’ if you’re only going to gain a minuscule fraction of performance enhancement?

Arrow Lake promises to be massively faster in graphical workloads, and if the table from Igor’s Lab proves accurate, could be one of the most anticipated tech drops of 2024. You'll need a new motherboard, however, since the chips will reside in the LGA1851 socket, unlike the LGA1700 socket used by Intel's 12th- and 13th-gen chips. That may be a bit of pain, but, you will get a lot more out of the upcoming chip than you would the Raptor Lake Refresh.

Better integrated graphical performance means you could play more games on your device without having a dedicated graphics card, opening up PC gaming to more people for a lot less!

The real question is whether the Arrow Lake range's lower-end CPUs will offer the same jump in iGPU performance, since the chip compared to the 13900K has the same 8+16 core configuration. If Intel can offer up a more affordable Arrow Lake chip with a similarly wild graphical performance leap, then we could see some very impressive budget machines in the not-too-distant future.

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Muskaan is TechRadar’s UK-based Computing writer. She has always been a passionate writer and has had her creative work published in several literary journals and magazines. Her debut into the writing world was a poem published in The Times of Zambia, on the subject of sunflowers and the insignificance of human existence in comparison. Growing up in Zambia, Muskaan was fascinated with technology, especially computers, and she's joined TechRadar to write about the latest GPUs, laptops and recently anything AI related. If you've got questions, moral concerns or just an interest in anything ChatGPT or general AI, you're in the right place. Muskaan also somehow managed to install a game on her work MacBook's Touch Bar, without the IT department finding out (yet).