Intel Z890 Motherboards To Feature Native Thunderbolt 4 Support, Arrow Lake Desktop CPUs With Up To 4 “Arc Xe-LPG” iGPU Cores

More details regarding the Intel Arrow Lake-S Desktop CPU platform and the Z890 motherboards have been revealed.

Intel Arrow Lake-S Desktop CPUs To Feature Half The iGPU "Xe-LPG" Cores As Meteor Lake, Get Native Thunderbolt 4 Support on Z890 Motherboards

Details regarding Intel's Arrow Lake-S "Core Ultra 200" Desktop CPUs and the respective 800-series platform are starting to take shape. The latest information comes from Golden Pig Upgrade who is talking about the SKUs, the iGPU configurations, and the top Z890 chipset.

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Starting with the SKUs, the Intel Core Ultra 200 "Arrow Lake-S" Desktop CPUs will be following the first-gen Core Ultra 100 "Meteor Lake" family and start at Core Ultra 5. We have detailed the three possible "Unlocked" SKUs which include the Core Ultra 9 285K, Core Ultra 7 265K, and Core Ultra 5 245K in a previous report here.

It looks like the lineup won't include Core Ultra 3 chips and Intel is likely to keep on selling and refreshing existing Core i3 CPUs to make up for the entry-level demand which is lower than what it seems to be despite having entry-level prices. Intel might offer a refresh with entry-level SKUs on existing LGA 1700 platforms such as the upcoming Bartlett Lake-S Desktop chips.

In terms of iGPU configurations, the Intel Arrow Lake-S "Core Ultra 200" Desktop CPUs will max out at 4 Xe-Cores based on the Alchemist Xe-LPG graphics architecture. These are half the cores versus the top Intel Core Ultra 9 "Meteor Lake" CPUs and certain SKUs are expected to feature 3 and 2 Xe-cores too. If you want to see how these iGPUs perform, you can look into the performance tests of Intel Core Ultra 7 165U/155U for reference as they also come with 4 Xe-core iGPUs.

The clock speed should be higher on the desktop chips due to higher TDPs and should provide decent performance but don't expect a lot. They would certainly not be able to match the top AMD