Intel Arrow Lake CPUs rumored to not have hyper-threading, but that doesn't mean they'll suck

The rumors around Intel's Arrow Lake processors are starting to pile up, and the latest one is a bit of a shocker in all honesty - that the chips which will follow next-gen Raptor Lake Refresh will do away with hyper-threading.

Yes, you read that right - hyper-threading will apparently fall by the wayside with 15th-gen silicon, according to the latest video packed full of Intel leaks from Moore's Law is Dead (MLID) on YouTube.

The good news is that MLID has aired rumors in the past promising huge gains for Arrow Lake - we're talking the CPUs being up to 40% faster than Meteor Lake (the Core i5 desktop offering that was supposedly canceled) in multi-core - and that kind of huge gain still holds true. In other words, the sample processors used to produce that major (rumored) uplift already had hyper-threading disabled.

In short, the big leap Arrow Lake promises to take in Q4 2024 is still happening, even without hyper-threading on the menu. (That is, of course, assuming MLID is right with this latest rumor, but the leaker sounds pretty certain and cites multiple sources).

MLID also addresses a recent leak from Igor's Lab which suggested Arrow Lake processors are looking more like a 20% uplift, pointing out that his sources inside Intel found the relevant documentation Igor obtained, and noted that this was very early testing on the 15th-gen CPUs.

In other words, this was just a progress report from way back, and in the context of where Intel's Arrow Lake silicon was at that time, represented an impressive achievement - mainly because this was an early Core i7 chip compared to the Core i9-13900K. Yes, a processor from the tier below the flagship - with no hyper-threading - was up to 20% quicker than the 13900K in an early working state.

Hyper-threading or no hyper-threading, then, it doesn't seem like there's much to worry about when it comes to Arrow Lake's performance. As MLID points out, if the Core i7 is that strong, then if there really is a Core i9 that ups the ante to 40-cores (as rumored, with 32 efficiency cores), imagine how quick that's going to be.

Granted, the fly in the ointment is that this 40-core Arrow Lake monster might be delayed until 2025. MLID mentions this again in his latest video, noting that the 40-core processor may not arrive until Q2 or Q3 2025 - and as we've discussed previously, AMD is apparently wheeling out some big guns too - so it's potentially a delay that'll cost Intel.

Remember, as we reported recently, another YouTube leaker just dialed up expectations for the performance increase we could witness with Ryzen 8000, and those chips could be here well ahead of Arrow Lake - quite possibly landing in mid-2024. We shall see...