Leaked Dell roadmap introduces split Intel/Qualcomm lineup through to Nova Lake in 2027
A leaked roadmap of Dell's laptop plans shows the system builder is planning on supporting five new CPU architectures in new Dell machines over just three years, with the current Raptor Lake and Meteor Lake models being given a serious overhaul.
The detailed plan was discovered by Videocardz, in the form of a 300-page document that goes into great depth about Dell's plans for its XPS series of laptops, powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon X processors. Amongst the jumble of pages is a chart that shows the projected timescale for implementing Intel's next generation of CPU architectures.
At the moment, Dell uses a combination of Raptor Lake (RPL-H, RPL-P) and Meteor Lake (MTL-H) chips for all its XPS laptops, but this year will introduce an updated XPS 13 model, sporting one of two Arm-based Snapdragon X CPUs. Later in 2024, that same model will be updated again but this time, sporting an Intel Lunar Lake chip.
The larger XPS 16 range will sport Arrow Lake (ARL-H) processors in 2025, before swapping them to Panther Lake (PTL-H) chips in 2026. XPS 14 laptops will also get Arrow Lake next year but according to the chart, that model will be superseded by two new designs: one will be Panther Lake like the XPS 16 but the other will sport a second generation of Snapdragon X processors.
Still with me? Good. Other snippets tucked away in that one chart are the expectation that Nvidia's next generation of mobile GPUs (i.e. Blackwell RTX 50-series) will appear in 2025 and that Intel's eventual successor to Panther Lake, called Nova Lake, is expected to make an appearance in 2027.
So, to summarise things a bit, a total of five different architectures in the space of just three years. That's a radically progressive strategy by Dell, even though it regularly updates its portfolio every time AMD or Intel releases a new CPU. Meteor Lake, Arrow Lake, and Panther Lake probably share a common platform or at the very least, share some common elements.
But that's still an awful lot of
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