Golden Pig Upgrade’s leak (Videocardz) has some information to be expected, such as Arrow Lake ditching DDR4 and having the weakest iGPU on the current Meteor Lake chips. But he also says Arrow Lake won't have hyper-threading, and Intel won't make most of the models; they'll use TSMC's processes instead.

Golden Pig Upgrade’s post is in Chinese, so we rely on VideoCardz's translation. Five of these claims are already likely: Arrow Lake will be called Series 2, it won't work with DDR4, it won't have low-power E-cores, it'll only have four Xe cores, and the top-end models won't need a PCH.

Intel's old Gen name was scrapped, and Meteor Lake doesn't use DDR4, so that's nothing new. Switching off the low-power E-cores makes sense because they're useless for high-power CPUs. Arrow Lake will have the sam. e four-core GPU tile as the cheap Meteor Lake models.

Golden Pig Upgrade says that Arrow Lake won't have hyper-threading and that its NPU will be the same as Meteor Lake's. We've seen leaked Arrow Lake CPUs without hyper-threading, but they could be test samples with hyper-threading turned off.

There have been rumours that Intel will kill off hyper-threading, which is likely particularly because Mr Pig has a cracking track record. The claim that the NPU is not only the same as Meteor Lake's but performs the same is baffling. Intel says Arrow Lake triples AI performance, but that could be only for some CPUs or thanks to the GPU.

Golden Pig also said that Intel's 20A node will only be for mid-range Arrow Lake compute tiles with six P-cores and eight E-cores. It's hard to tell if he means this just for mobile CPUs or desktop ones, but this is news. Intel has been banging on about 20A and its new PowerVia and RibbonFETs, so it's hard to believe Intel will only use it for some of the Arrow Lake range. The leaker didn't say what TSMC node Intel would use, but maybe he means 3nm.

It has been rumoured that Intel will use TSMC's 3nm process for Lunar Lake MX, but that seems to be a different version of Lunar Lake. Intel's slides show there won't be much room for 20A and 18A chips in 2024 or 2025, so this rumour may be true because of supply problems. Still, it would be a massive shocker if the CPU meant to put Intel back on top is mainly powered by TSMC, even if that's only for the low-end mobile models.