Intel Reportedly Increasing Arrow Lake’s Thermal Limit To 105°C

Low Boon Shen
By Low Boon Shen 3 Min Read

Your next Intel CPU is getting hotter (by design) – according to leaker @jaykihn0 (who has since been featured in various other Intel-related leaks recently), Intel is increasing the thermal limit, or TjMax for short, to 105°C.

Arrow Lake Gets More Thermal Headroom?

The leaker simply states that Arrow Lake and Panther Lake (Lunar Lake’s expected successor) will raise the TjMax to 105°C, whereas the upcoming Lunar Lake laptop chips will retain the usual 100°C thermal limit. Most Intel CPUs today limits themselves at 100°C, and throttles back the clock speed if this temperature is reached to protect the chip from damage. However, this value usually comes with some margin – in some cases, the chip has to reach 115°C before a “thermal shutdown” event occurs, which is where the chip is too hot to operate before causing any permanent damage.

The increase of TjMax on paper should provide Arrow Lake extra thermal headroom to hit higher clock speeds more aggressively, assuming the TDP or VRM limits were not throttling the chip first. CPUs are fairly resilient components in general, so as long as it’s under the thermal shutdown threshold with some margin, it’s very unlikely that degradation may happen.

Intel Reportedly Increasing Arrow Lake's Thermal Limit To 105°C
Intel Reportedly Increasing Arrow Lake's Thermal Limit To 105°C

That being said, Intel is currently embroiled in reliability concerns from its 13th and 14th Gen Core i9 processors, and the company has yet to find a definitive fix to solve the seemingly significant number of crashes from gamers and servers alike. While the issue is not directly tied to power or heat generation, the negative sentiment against Core i9 processors may prove difficult for Intel to convince the users the new TjMax limit will be safe to operate.

AMD faced similar concerns over its 95°C limit for Ryzen 7000 desktop processors, and while no major heat-related failures related to the chip itself has been reported (short for a motherboard-related voltage bug that caused some Ryzen 7 7800X3D chips to explode), the chipmaker has since dialed back the power limits on its Ryzen 9000 chips to hopefully ease those concerns.

Pokdepinion: It’ll be interesting to see how much extra performance can be extracted from that 5°C worth of extra thermal headroom.

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