Intel seems to be preparing its own “Halo” lineup under the Arrow Lake family which would tackle AMD Strix Halo & Apple offerings.
Intel Might Go Big With Arrow Lake Halo CPU Offerings, Aimed At Enthusiast Workstations With Bigger iGPU & Embedded Cache
Spotted in a shipping manifesto at NBD.LTD, we have our first look at an early sample of the Intel Arrow Lake Halo CPU which has been designated as an enthusiast mobile workstation platform. It looks like the chip has been tested on the “CEDARLHX5SO1DPC1” which is an RVP or Reference Evaluation Platform that will be used to test the chip internally before it’s sent out. The CPU was sent recently but looks to be produced sometime in 2023 (34th week) which means that it’s almost one year old.
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Currently, Intel plans to launch at least four Arrow Lake families, Arrow Lake-S for Desktops and Arrow Lake-HX/H/U for Laptops. However, the Intel Arrow Lake Halo family rumors go back to as early as 2022 when the chip was mentioned by AdoredTV and back then, it was labeled as Arrow Lake-P (Halo).
We saw an alleged Intel slide back then which listed the Halo SKU as ARL-P 6C+8A+GT3 “Halo”. The chip was mentioned to hit production in week 33 of 2023 which aligns with the production date in the shipping manifesto. These chips were designed to target Apple’s 14″ premium designs & were going to be the introduction to the Lion Cove P-Core and Skymont E-Core architectures on TSMC’s N3 process node. The chip was also going to feature a bigger GT3-tier iGPU with ADM cache which would have served as the L4 for the iGPU. There were going to be five tiles in total, CPU, SOC, IOE, GT3 GPU, and ADM.
The chip was planned before anyone knew about AMD’s Strix Halo and it looks like the red team got motivation to make their own “Halo” tier SKU after looking at the early Arrow Lake Halo plans which did look quite enticing.
Intel was going to feature 14 cores and pack them with a bigger GT3 GPU with 320 Execution Units and a dedicated Adamantine L4 cache which would have boosted their performance by a good margin. The iGPU was going to leverage the Alchemist Xe-LPG (+) graphics architecture but it would still have been a solid product given the optimizations Intel made to its GPU family through the latest drivers.
Some of the features we would’ve seen on the intel Arrow Lake Halo CPUs included:
- Five Tile Architecture (CPU,GPU,SOC,IO,L4)
- 6 Lion Cove P-Cores
- 8 Skymont E-Cores
- Up To 320 Xe-LPG EUs (20 Xe Cores)
- L4 Adamantine Cache
- Based on TSMC N3 Process Node
However, the plans for Intel Arrow Lake Halo CPUs dropped or changed a lot. Intel’s Arc Alchemist lineup didn’t pan out as expected in the start and the actual product to introduced Lion Cove P-Cores and Skymont E-Cores isn’t a Halo chip but a thin and light SoC known as Lunar Lake. Intel is also listed as “Halo” having priority over Arrow Lake-S but that also isn’t the case anymore as Arrow Lake Desktop CPUs are on track for an October launch whereas there are no new leaks or even rumors of Halo seeing a 2024 launch let alone a 2025 launch.
This new listing might give us hope that we might still see Intel’s Arrow Lake Halo chips in some form or shape, maybe as a limited OEM-partnered SKU but that remains to be seen. AMD on the other hand is very well into production of its Strix Halo CPUs which are coming to market by next year.