Intel roadmap: The upcoming CPU generations until 2025 in detail

What will happen after the current CPU generation Intel Alder Lake S? This is revealed by the Intel roadmap, which has now been officially presented. We can expect four new “Lake” generations by 2025 – starting with Intel Raptor Lake during 2022.

Intel roadmap: Raptor Lake as refresh during the year

Kicking off the published Intel roadmap is the Raptor Lake generation, which will launch as a refresh of the current Alder Lake before the end of the second half of 2022. In a roughly three-hour presentation, Intel gave a preview of the future “Lake” CPU series during Investors Day 2022.

Raptor Lake continues the socket basis of the current Alder Lake CPUs, but offers twice the number of efficiency cores: 16 E-cores are combined with eight performance cores, which means that 32 threads are available.

Furthermore, Raptor Lake promises improved overclocking potential and a significant gain in the multi-threading area. Intel is rather vague about the performance increase in single-core use. Only in the footnotes is there talk of a “performance boost in the double-digit range”.

Intel Meteor Lake in 2023

Next year, the new (14th) Meteor Lake CPU generation should then be launched. It marks a novelty, because from this generation on, the manufacturer relies on a chiplet-based architecture with several chips on a die. CPU, GPU, SoC and I/O parts are installed in a tiled architecture from the Meteor Lake generation.

The individual components of the new chips have already been manufactured and are already used in lab tests, as Intel confirmed. Now the tests were about finalizing the overall package and preparing the market launch for the coming year. Thanks to the modular design of the chip, called “Intel 4 Process Node”, Intel is also able to combine different chiplets depending on the application area.

Intel Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake

Intel also provides a first preview of the subsequent CPU generations. They go by the names Intel Arrow Lake (release in 2024) and Intel Lunar Lake (also in 2024). Arrow Lake uses the Intel 20A Node production level, which is supposed to enable a performance increase of up to 15% per watt.

This offensive promise in terms of performance is then to be continued with the 16th Intel core generation called Lunar Lake, which uses Intel 18A. The new stage is supposed to be ready for mass production from the end of 2024 and increase the performance per watt even more. Intel itself speaks of “ultra-low power performance” here, which should initially speak for a use in the mobile and notebook sector.

Until that time comes, however, the Meteor Lake generation has a hot iron in the fire that promises a lot with the modular design of the chips, the advanced 7 nm manufacturing and the new GPU solution as a further development of Intel Xe.