Not all pads are the same size, probably to keep distance from the other pads for isolation or prevention of electromagnetic interference.
The max ring limit has to do with the new segmentation of the P core locations. Because there is a group of P cores in the middle of the E-cores, ring max tends to be limited to around 4200 mhz. On SKU’s where this middle group is not present (example: 245k) you can get up to 4.4 ghz. So you have a delta penalty of 200 mhz for the middle group of p-cores enabled).
When the 6 large cores and 8 small cores are tested separately, each set of cores can generate more than 50W of power consumption, and when the two sets of cores work at the same time, the peak power consumption even exceeds 100W. . Fortunately, the model used for the test can easily cope with 100W of continuous power consumption, which allows us to fully demonstrate the performance of the Arrow Lake H45 processor.
Cache and Memory
In terms of large cores, Arrow Lake H45 has 3 MB of L2 cache capacity, which is 0.5 MB more than Lunar Lake; at the same time, the L3 cache capacity has reached 24 MB, which is twice that of Lunar Lake. However, this improvement is not without cost: Arrow Lake H45 inherits the low ring frequency problem of Meteor Lake, even if its core runs at 5.1 GHz, the ring frequency is only 3.9 GHz. In contrast, Lunar Lake can reach a ring frequency of 4.4 GHz when the core runs at 4.8 GHz.
Big Core
When testing memory access, we found that Arrow Lake performs similarly to Lunar Lake at the L0, L1, and L2 levels. However, when it comes to the L3 level, its performance characteristics begin to get closer to Meteor Lake. At the 8 MB test point, the latency of the 255H reached 75 cycles, close to the 81 cycles of the 155H, and much higher than the 59 cycles of the 258V and the 45 cycles of the HX 370. Although the 255H has a much larger L3 capacity than the HX 370, the cost of accessing L3 is 80% higher than that of the HX 370, which will greatly offset the hit rate advantage of this layer of cache. This phenomenon will also be reflected in the subsequent SPEC integer test results.
Small Core
Arrow Lake's small cores perform more like Lunar Lake's LPE cores with L3 cache added to them. The 255H's small cores have exactly the same latency characteristics as the 258V in the L1 and L2 ranges, and are similar to the 155H in terms of L3 and memory.
One guy's experience: https://www.overclock.net/posts/29427534/Do Arrow Lake CPUs undervolt well at all based on yall experiences?