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Speculation on whether or not Intel is planning to release a refreshed design of its Arrow Lake chips has been swirling once again. The chip maker has done everything it can to quash talk around a new Arrow Lake iteration, including confirm the 2026 release of its successor, Nova Lake. That won’t be enough, however as Videocardz has spotted more Arrow Lake refresh talk out in the wilds.
Weibo is a popular Chinese social media microblogging site, and is often a great source for leaks, or just weirdly specific speculation that turns out to be true. Even with that primer, I understand if the following sentence sounds a little weird. Golden Pig Upgrade Pack, a Weibo user known for sharing information on upcoming Intel products, says the Arrow Lake refresh is confirmed and that it will be coming to both laptops and desktop variations.
That’s apparently all the information we get on that for now, but I’m not one to look a gift golden pig in the mouth. If previous rumours still hold true this points to a version of Arrow Lake chips, such as the Intel Core Ultra 9 285, with an improved neural processing unit (NPU), as opposed to one with more cores. This is inline with Intel going all in on the AI processing of the unit, which would make some sense in the current climate.
Though with the questionable success of ‘AI PCs’ and the limited power of NPUs compared with GPUs we’re still waiting on a true killer use case for the extra AI silicon CPU folk keep jamming into their cores.
What doesn’t make a tonne of sense is everything else. Arrow Lake didn’t exactly hit its target at launch, with most being pretty underwhelmed by the chips. Even after the second round of upgrades launched with fixes, you still won’t hear much praise for this generation of chips.
We’ve also already seen Intel’s plans for new gaming laptop CPUs with the new Core Ultra 200HX series announced in January. Though it’s likely any refresh we see will be a Core Ultra 300 series instead. It’ll be interesting to see how closely they release. That is, of course, if these rumours prove true.
There’s a fairly good chance Intel is posed to do something like this. We don’t often see rumours resurrect from the dead unless there’s something behind it. Plus, it’s pretty on-brand. Intel has been known to sneakily slide out processor refreshes, and Arrow Lake could do with literally anything to refresh its reputation. Here’s hoping whatever comes out is a bit more inspiring than what we’ve seen so far.
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Kurt Indovina
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