Intel Arrow Lake CPU Strips And Flashes Its Tiled Dies In Naked Photo Shoot
As is customary whenever a company like AMD or Intel launches a new processor lineup, someone is going to rip off the integrated heatspreader (IHS) to expose the die area. That's precisely what has happened with a purported Intel Arrow Lake (Core Ultra 200S) processor, and what makes this especially interesting is that it's Intel's first desktop chip to feature a tiled architecture.
Yes, we've seen tiled CPUs from Intel before, and notably with Meteor Lake in 2023 followed by this year's Lunar Lake launch. But those are all mobile chips for laptops. Arrow Lake brings a similar tiled design language to the desktop for the first time, and just like in mobile, they break a monolithic chip into separate functional units, or discrete slices of silicon. A high-bandwidth interconnect on a package substrate connects the pieces.
We already got a glimpse of an Arrow Lake CPU with its IHS removed when, earlier this month, X/Twitter user @CodeCommando_ posted front and back photos of a naked Core Ultra 9 285K processor. It wasn't a very high quality photo, though. Now we get some much cleaner shots as well as a short video, courtesy of @Mandess727. Have a look...
I just can't stop myself from delidding stuff pic.twitter.com/XmniBHY5U8
— Madness! (@Madness727) October 18, 2024
Intel provided a cheat sheet of the tiled makeup of its Arrow Lake processors, and using that as a reference, we can identify what each of the tiles represent. The largest rectangle is the compute tile, and off to the right side sit the filler tile on the bottom and an I/O tile just above it, both sitting vertically if standing the CPU in a portrait orientation.
Up top, the big rectangle tile that runs horizontally is the SoC, and the slimmer horizontal tile just above it is a the GPU tile. All of these pieces sit on a base tile that you can't see in the images.
One thing we don't know is which specific CPU we're looking at in the photos. Intel announced five SKUs, including the Core Ultra 9 285K ($589 MSRP), Core Ultra 7 265K ($394 MSRP), Core Ultra 7 265K ($379 MSRP), Core Ultra 5 245K ($309 MSRP), and Core Ultra 5 245KF ($294 MSRP).
The delidded chip could be any of those, as the visible tiled layout should be the same on all five models regardless of the number of cores and whether or not the onboard graphics are disabled (as designed by the 'F' in the model name).
We also don't know if the chip still functions. Removing the IHS from a processor is a delicate process that is not for the faint of heart or wallet. Either way, it's pretty neat to get a pretty clear look at the tiled structure.
