Here’s What Intel Needs To Do To Beat AMD

Key Takeaways

Arrow Lake offers promising performance ahead against AMD, but efficiency and thermal management remain hurdles for Intel.
Intel’s plan to boost CPU performance by 25-40% with Arrow Lake while ditching hyper-threading shows potential progress.
Keeping a consistent socket and chipset for extended CPU support could attract consumers concerned about sustainability and upgrade costs.

Intel has an uphill battle with the launch of Arrow Lake, the company’s next-gen architecture for desktop-class processors. AMD’s Ryzen 7000 series was a hit with the media and general public with many leaping onto the AM5 platform to take advantage of Zen 4’s improved efficiency and reliable performance. Intel’s 14th-gen CPUs aren’t terrible, they’re just not as good as they could be from Intel.

The Intel Core i9-14900KS is the fastest processor with a maximum boost speed of 6.2 GHz without manual overclocking, but it’ll thermal throttle itself into the ground when you attempt to push it hard. Heat and inefficiency are troubling Intel’s CPU line-up and Arrow Lake needs to address this.

What we know so far about Arrow Lake

It’s looking good for a competitive space

More details surrounding Intel’s Arrow Lake processors have emerged and much of it has been positive news for Team Blue. AMD is continuing to knock it out of the block with the Ryzen line-up of desktop-class CPUs and while Intel has been able to keep up, it’s evident with 14th-gen chips that Intel is pushing its current architecture to its limit. That’s where Arrow Lake comes into play, which should bring a more efficient manufacturing process to allow Intel to cram more onto the package and improve overall efficiency.

According to some rumors, we could see a 25% to 40% performance uplift for Arrow Lake processors, compared to Meteor Lake. Arrow Lake is expected to ditch hyper-threading, which allows each core to process two instructions simultaneously. This move would typically hinder the performance of a processor, yet Intel is rumored to achieve substantial instructions-per-clock (IPC) gains for Arrow Lake. It does make sense if the company can leap forward a few processes to meet AMD as this alone would bring benefits before making architectural changes.

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Everything we expect from Intel for Arrow Lake

Here’s everything we know about Intel’s next-gen processors.

We expect Intel’s next generation of chips to be built on its 20A process, the equivalent of a 2nm manufacturing process. 14th-gen processors are built using a 7nm process, which is behind AMD with TMSC’s 5nm process. The smaller the process, the more transistors can be crammed onto the silicon, and the better the performance or efficiency. Intel needs to make this move work as it has struggled with shrinking the process and lagged behind TMSC. For comparison, AMD’s Zen 5 processors will launch on a 4nm process so Intel would once again be out ahead.

Support the same socket and chipsets for longer

Let everyone keep their motherboards

We’ve already got an electronics waste problem and excessive consumerism won’t end anytime soon. Intel could help by following AMD in supporting the same CPU socket and motherboard chipsets for longer. Intel would typically support the same socket and chipset for two CPU generations, although this changed with the launch of 14th-gen Raptor Lake-refresh processors. AMD has used the AM4 platform since Ryzen was first released, only switching to AM5 for the AMD Ryzen 7000 series to support PCIe 5.0 and DDR5.

This would be a solid move for the environment, allowing motherboards to support more CPU generations and be kept through system upgrades. It’s also a win for consumers who can rely on the same foundations for longer, saving money by only purchasing a new CPU. Whether this comes to be is yet to be seen, but it would go a long way to attract those Intel has since lost to its primary CPU rival. AMD Ryzen will continue running on the same AM5 platform for many years, helping lock PC owners in with the potential for future upgrades.

Keep power usage and temperatures down

14th-gen CPUs were too hot

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One area Intel needs to improve upon with Arrow Lake is heat and power consumption. The latter became ridiculous with the Intel Core i9-14900K and 14900KS. The 14900KS is of particular note since it can happily pull more than 300W from the power supply. All this electricity causes considerable waste heat, which sends temperatures sky-high and causes the chip to thermal throttle. In our testing, we found the 14900Ks to throttle from 6.2 GHz to 5.8 GHz with an AIO liquid cooler and 360mm radiator.

The Cor ei9 is more of an enthusiast processor marketed by Intel as a gaming chip. If an AIO liquid cooler with a 360mm radiator struggles to keep temperatures low enough to avoid thermal throttling inside a high-airflow chassis, we can’t keep increasing power, so Intel has to look at efficiency and IPC. An architectural shift with Arrow Lake would facilitate this and could enable Intel to beat AMD on more than performance alone.

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Best Intel CPUs

If you’re in the market to buy a new Intel CPU, then we have some solid recommendations for you in our collection of the best Intel CPUs.

We’re excited to test next-gen AMD and Intel CPUs

Things are heating up in the CPU space and this can only be good for consumers with more competition to drive down prices and maintain innovation. AMD and Intel have some serious performance hitting shelves in the coming months and we cannot wait to get them on our test bench to see how they fare against one another. So long as Intel can mark off a few of our suggestions here, it should be in a good position to hit back at AMD Ryzen.