Intel Reportedly Considering Resurrection of "Arrow Lake Refresh" Processor Family

[T0@st]

Intel is reported to be eyeing a revival of its "Arrow Lake Refresh" desktop processor design—Golden Pig Upgrade disclosed this "strange" revelation via an updated Weibo blog post. Back in 2023, the Chinese hardware reviewer and leaker extraordinaire theorized that Team Blue's much-rumored shelving of "ARL-S/HX Refresh" came down to cost/benefit considerations relating to accommodating an upgraded NPU in the chip's tile-based design. Last September, reports suggested that Intel had put the final kibosh on a 14th Gen Core Ultra 8P+32E "Arrow Lake Refresh" processor series—leaked roadmaps had a launch window marked down for late 2025, going into 2026. Industry watchdogs have picked up on Golden Pig Upgrade's latest forecast—prompting further theorizing.

Intel has its mobile segment's future covered with Panther Lake (later in 2025) and Nova Lake (2026), but a notable gap exists in their desktop world. Nova Lake's desktop S-series is slated for launch at some point in 2026, so this year could be prime territory for a mild refresh of existing Arrow Lake-S processors—on the LGA1851 socket. Golden Pig Upgrade reckons that refreshes of ARL-S (desktop) and ARL-HX (high-end laptop) are back on Team Blue's upcoming product roadmap. Industry moles reckon that an updated NPU design—potentially similar to the one housed in Lunar Lake mobile chips—will be the only major upgrade lined up for the so-called "Core Ultra 300" processor series. Intel's current-gen flagship model—Core Ultra 9 285K—has NPU performance topping off at 13 TOPS. Refreshed Arrow Lake SKUs could be deployed with an improved NPU aspect, perhaps capable of hitting 48 TOPS.



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[phanbuey]

wow...

of all the reasons ARL-S failed, the NPU is probably on the rock bottom of the list.

 

[usiname]

100Mhz higher clock and LGA-1851 will has "upgrade path" and 2 flops per socket

 

[Bobaganoosh]

wow...

of all the reasons ARL-S failed, the NPU is probably on the rock bottom of the list.

^exactly.

Unless they can actually improve latency and I would even suggest pricing, it's not a competitive platform. I wouldn't think they even need to bump clocks much if they can improve the memory performance. I'm pretty sure that would require moving the memory controller to a different tile though, so I don't know how that'd be considered just a "refresh", which means there's no point in doing a refresh at all. It'll sell just like the current Arrow lineup does.

 

[Vayra86]

Looks like Intel is back to business as usual, just pump out product, maximum confusion.

 

[Nostras]

I'm a bit confused, is the 8+32 variant back on the menu or is Intel simplifying the refresh by just doing a clock bump and an NPU upgrade?
If 8+32 is happening it would make for one hell of a productivity machine.

 

[phints]

265K was my disappointment of the year, was hoping for strong competition. I care about 8-12 good p-cores, don't care about power wasting Cinebench accelerator e-cores, and certainly don't care about their weak ass NPU performance.

Intel spent all that money on TSMC 3N lithography when it should be going to AMD for Ryzen 9000 and Nvidia for RTX 5000, then we would actually see some big gains out of CPUs/GPUs that matter. Instead we got mediocrity across the board.

 

[efikkan]

This looks like to be nothing but baseless speculation;
Firstly, if Intel were to do a traditional refresh (partial or complete), will mainly depend on whether the yields have improved significantly after the QS samples or not. (no point in a refresh if the yields are unchanged)
Secondly, a "refresh" with a bigger NPU, in other words a significant change, is not something they could throw together over night. If there are such products in the works, then they should be at the second iteration of engineering samples by now, and the development have been progressing all along.
So either way, this "source" provides nothing that makes sense. Not to mention that nobody is buying the competition because Arrow Lake lacks a bigger NPU.

While bumping the clock speeds 200-300 MHz probably wouldn't do a lot for the user experience, it will probably help the quite a bit in benchmarks where it falls short compared to Raptor Lake. While Arrow Lake is undoubtedly much more powerful than its predecessor, much of the media attention focuses on the things that really matters; like 720p/1080p gaming with high-end GPUs at lower details and various edge cases and synthetic benchmarks. Joking aside, there is no doubt that I would pick Ultra 9 285K over i9 14900K if I had to choose one of them.

What should have been the response to Arrow Lake is not claiming it's bad, as it's evidently not, but that it's too small of an upgrade to justify a new platform. Additionally, obviously the self-inflicted problem of lacking AVX-512. We are also forgetting that Raptor Lake with its super-aggressive burst speeds have much more inconsistent performance, which is noticeable, and has been a valid reason to consider the competition.

 

[Gunbound]

I am not too familiar with the roadmaps and how intel would do things, but if they did a refresh on ARL desktop I can still expect another generation of SKUs coming afterwards for the z890 chipset right? I ask because usually 2 generations per board with Intel, right? So would a refresh count?

 

[freeagent]

Its ok guys, Intel is just spamming the market like Thermalright did

Soon there will be CPUs for all the coolers!

 

[Squared]

An Arrow Lake refresh ought to have been planned for a long time. Arrow Lake uses TSMC's N3B node, which is the worst N3 node. A refresh moving to N3P or N3X would be much better-suited for desktop because it would reach much higher frequencies and game a bit better. Throw in eight additional E cores for productivity workloads, and it would be a good product. Also, it would be very similar to the upgrade Raptor Lake was over Alder Lake. Still no AVX-512 though.

 

[lexluthermiester]

Seems to me that Intel is just leveraging their assets.