Intel Arrow, Lunar and Nova Lake codenames -- a possible peek at 2023-2025

Possible details about Intel's future desktop processors have leaked to the Internet. Last month, the chip giant revealed its new process node strategy and now there's a leak that provides codenames of three previously unknown architectures plus a surprising amount of details.

Arrow, Lunar and Nova Lake?

VideoCardz writes the source of this information is a post from Anandtech forum member "Curmudgeon666". The information suggests the next couple of desktop generations from Intel will be relatively weak versus what AMD and Apple will have to offer.

Making this sort of long-term performance predictions is hard but the leaker claims Intel's Alder Lake, Raptor Lake, and Meteor Lake generations will not be able to achieve performance parity with AMD. If the information is accurate, the next big move from Intel will not hit the market until 2025. Codenamed Nova Lake, this is said to be a completely new architecture made from the ground up, marking the biggest change since the introduction of Core in 2006.

All generations after Alder Lake will feature a combination of high-performance and high-efficiency cores. Allegedly, the Nova Lake design intends to deliver an up to 50 percent CPU performance boost versus Lunar Lake. The latter is scheduled for a Q4 2024 launch. It's said that Lunar Lake will use TSMC's 3nm process.

Alder Lake (Golden Cove/Gracemont) Q4’21 / Q1’22
predicted to be competitively weak vs AMD/Apple offerings that time.

Raptor Lake (Raptor Cove / Gracemont) Q3’22 / Q4’22
10% CPU perf boost and 8/16 configuration puts intel back on par but expect AMD/Apple to refresh their products as well.

Meteor Lake (Redwood Cove / Crestmont) Q2’23
Intel’s first true chiplet or tile based design. Different dies built on TSMC / Intel processes. More of a node shrink with single digit performance improvements. AMD will again extend lead with Zen 4+ / 5.

Arrow Lake (Lion Cove / Skymont) Q4’23
Will feature an updated compute tile with 8/32 config for the high end enthusiast products. Might achieve parity with AMD offerings at the time but loses out to Apple in power efficiency.

Lunar Lake (Lion Cove / Skymont) Q4’24
This is the product that will use TSMC 3nm as reported by Nikkei. Big performance jump expected and designed to achieve parity or beat AMD and Apple in both performance and power efficiency.

Nova Lake (Panther Cove [tentative]/ Darkmont) 2025
This will mark the biggest architectural change in cpu architecture since the Core architecture is introduced in 2006. Intel is working to build an entirely new architecture from the ground up much like Ryzen with up to 50% cpu performance improvement from lunar lake. This is also the reason why Glenn Hinton returned.

As always, I recommend taking this information with a grain of salt.