An interesting Intel document leaked out last month—it contained detailed pre-release information that covered their upcoming 15th Gen Core Arrow Lake-S desktop CPU platform, including a possible best scenario 8+16+1 core configuration. Thorough analysis of the spec sheet revealed a revelation—the next generation Core processor family could "lack Hyper-Threading (HT) support." The rumor mill had produced similar claims in the past, but the internal technical memo confirmed that Arrow Lake's "expected eight performance cores without any threads enabled via SMT." These specifications could be subject to change, but tipster—InstLatX64—has uprooted an Arrow Lake-S engineering sample: "I spotted (CPUID C0660, 24 threads, 3 GHz, without AVX 512) among the Intel test machines."

The leaker had uncovered several pre-launch Meteor Lake SKUs last year—with 14th Gen laptop processors hitting the market recently, InstLatX64 has turned his attention to seeking out next generation parts. Yesterday's Arrow Lake-S find has chins wagging about the 24 thread count aspect (sporting two more than the fanciest Meteor Lake Core Ultra 9 processor)—this could be an actual 24 core total configuration—considering the evident lack of hyper-threading, as seen on the leaked engineering sample. Tom's Hardware reckons that the AVX-512 instruction set could be disabled via firmware or motherboard UEFI—if InstLatX64's claim of "without AVX-512" support does ring true, PC users (demanding such workloads) are best advised to turn to Ryzen 7040 and 8040 series processors, or (less likely) Team Blue's own 5th Gen Xeon "Emerald Rapids" server CPUs.

Yesterday's CPU-Z update—now version 2.09—brings support for unreleased next generation Intel and AMD processors. PC hardware sleuths have combed through the freeware app's mid-January changelog—we first see "improved support" for Intel's recently launched 14th Generation Meteor Lake mobile CPU series, while the same line also mentions "preliminary support" for Team Blue's Arrow Lake desktop processor family. The latter is hotly anticipated to launch at the tail-end of 2024, so it is intriguing to see CPU-Z's development team getting familiar with Intel's mainstream 15th gen microarchitecture.

The main competition also makes an appearance further down—AMD's "Hawk Point and Hawk Point 2 (Zen 4/Zen 4c)" CPU families are present, although the changelog does not clarify whether this is preliminary support (or full blown). "Hawk Point" seems to be a very light refresh of their proceeding "Phoenix" product line, with some extra NPU "oomph" sprinkled in. The rumor mill has Team Red's Ryzen 8040 Series of mobile parts marked down for a first quarter 2024 launch. Version 2.09 also adds support for NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER (AD104-350-A1) GPUs. We expect to see the higher-up models joining in on the fun, with upcoming CPU-Z updates.