Unreleased Core Ultra 200S CPU has already been delidded — streamer shares beautiful die shots of Intel's upcoming Arrow Lake chip

Less than a week before Intel's Core Ultra 200S (codenamed Arrow Lake) series debut, someone has already delidded one of Intel's new Arrow Lake desktop chips. Twitch streamer and enthusiast Madeness727 shared images on X of an Arrow Lake-S CPU they delidded, revealing fundamental architectural changes Intel made to its latest chips.

Madeness727's die shots represent the first die shots we have seen of Arrow Lake-S, and they are also high-resolution photos featuring great detail. The shots of Arrow Lake with the IHS physically removed showcase the most distinctive design change Intel has implemented in Arrow Lake compared to its preceding architectures: adding tiles (i.e., chiplets).

Arrow Lake has five tiles in total, featuring a compute tile, GPU tile, SOC tile, and I/O tile. The final tile is a "dummy" or filler tile to provide structural integrity. The images showcase all five of these tiles. Like AMD, Intel employs several process nodes per tile to save money. The compute tile (where the cores live) is fabbed on TSMC's N3B node, the GPU tile, N5P, and the SoC and I/O tiles on TSMC's older N6 node. All five tiles are assembled on a base tile fabbed on 22nm FinFET utilizing Intel's Foveros 3D packaging.

If we were to compare Arrow Lake to a Raptor Lake die, there would be no dividing lines in the die since Raptor Lake was engineered with a monolithic approach. Arrow Lake's design resembles Meteor Lake, Intel's first architecture incorporating a chipset-style approach. However, Arrow Lake is the first architecture to bring chiplets to the desktop front as far as Intel CPUs are concerned.

One shot shows the delidded Arrow Lake chip sitting inside the brand new LGA 1851 socket, a new socket compatible exclusively with Arrow Lake desktop CPUs for now. The new socket is 9% larger than LGA 1700 and will come with a new ILM that provides better CPU temperatures than 13th and 14th Generation Core chips.

Intel's new Core Ultra 200S series processors will debut on October 24. For launch, Intel is only launching its overclockable K series parts, featuring the flagship 24-core Core Ultra 9 285K, 20-core Core Ultra 7 265K, and 14-core Core Ultra 5 245K. Two more SKUs, the Core Ultra 7 265KF and Core Ultra 5 245KF, lack integrated graphics capabilities.