'World's first gaming processor with an AI accelerator': Intel's Arrow Lake will be coming to desktop PCs in the second half of this year

pcgamer.com:

This year's CES event has been utterly dominated by the constant talk and promotion of AI, and Intel's Client Computing keynote meeting was no different. However, executive vice president Michelle Holthaus did say that Intel's next CPU architecture for desktop PCs, codenamed Arrow Lake, is on target to hit the market in the second half of 2024. Oh, and it's the 'world's first gaming processor with an AI accelerator'.

Unfortunately, very little else was said about Intel's 15th generation of desktop chips but we already know several things about the design. The most important of which is that it's an expansion of the latest Meteor Lake design, where multiple tiles (compute, graphics, SoC, IO) are housed together with the Foveros packaging system.

It's a little like AMD's chiplet approach with its desktop Ryzen, Threadripper, and EPYC models, except there the chips are physically separated in the CPU package. Foveros involves stacking all of the tiles onto a common layer, reducing the lengths of the various chip interconnects.

Arrow Lake is also expected to be the first commercial product to be manufactured using Intel's 20A process node. This involves a significant change in the production of the silicon chips, switching from the FinFET (field effect transistor) design used for the past decade to a GaaFET (Gate-all-around) architecture, which Intel has dubbed RibbonFET.

Something else that will be new is PowerVia, better known as backside power delivery. This involves separating all of the input/output signalling connections and power lines so that the latter is applied to the back of the wafer. By doing this, chips should be able to run with slightly higher clock speeds and significantly reduce the level of internal