February 25 news, a few days ago a major roadmap about Intel's next-generation mobile platform was leaked, from this roadmap plan can be seen that Intel is developing a new CPU product line Arrow Lake series, which aims to develop products beyond the M1 Pro and M1 Max chips in late 2023 or early 2024 (that is, nearly two years later).
The roadmap shows that Intel is prioritizing mobile over desktops, and while it will launch both Arrow Lake-S and Arrow Lake-P CPUs at the same time, the company aims to first specialize in its 15th-generation mobile CPUs, prioritizing delivering high performance with minimal energy consumption to handle Apple's next-generation 14-inch MacBook laptop. This means that Intel will be fully committed to building its next-generation mobile product lineup, while it will make large-scale upgrades to the GPU and CPU architecture.
It is understood that the 15th generation Arrow Lake processor may release the first engineering samples in late 2022 and early 2023, the QS chip will be shipped in the third quarter of 2023, the final production will start in the same quarter, and the CPU will be ready for the RTS (ready to ship) in the fourth quarter of 2023. This means that the chip may be delivered in late 2023 or early 2024.
The roadmap also conveys an important message that Intel will leverage TSMC's 3nm process. As a competitor, Apple's current latest chip uses a 5nm process, which is expected to be upgraded to 3nm in 2023.
From the perspective of theoretical performance, Intel's latest Core i9 processor has surpassed the M1 Max chip in the benchmark score, but combined with battery, battery life and power consumption, this 4% performance improvement does not make users satisfied with the significantly reduced battery life. Tests have shown that laptops powered by Intel's latest Core i9 processors have only 6 hours of video playback time. In contrast, Apple claims that the 16-inch MacBook Pro provides up to 21 hours of video playback time, and the low-power advantage is obvious.