Intel remains a powerhouse with innovation, and the Core Ultra 2-series Arrow Lake seems to keep Intel on track to remain a market leader for desktop processors. With every processor generation, Intel promises a generational performance uplift, either from increased IPC of its cores, or more CPU cores, or increased clock speeds, besides increased power efficiency. Intel's play with "Arrow Lake" is to deliver on noticeable IPC increases, which translate to minor gaming performance gains, significant productivity performance gains from the massively improved "Skymont" E-cores, and an overall improvement in the processor's efficiency and performance/Watt from the switch to the new 3 nm TSMC foundry node for the Compute tile. Interestingly, this is a similar endpoint as Zen 5 offered over Zen 4, with significant architecture and efficiency advances that didn't translate well for gaming, but offered leaps forward in productivity.

There's not much to report on the platform front—the new Intel Z890 chipset offers similar connectivity as Z790 with a total of 48 platform PCIe lanes, 24 of which are from the processor, and 20 of which are PCIe Gen 5. You now get CPU-attached Gen 5 M.2 NVMe slots that don't eat into the x16 PEG slot. This, coupled with a revamped power architecture, is probably why Intel had to switch to a newer socket with LGA1851. The memory I/O of Arrow Lake introduces support for higher speeds enabled by CUDIMMs—modules that have client clock drivers (CKDs), which we expect to exceed 10000 MT/s soon. Intel recommends DDR5-8000 as the new "sweetspot" memory speed.

There are some areas of concern Arrow Lake, though. The gaming performance gains disclosed by Intel appear modest—they're practically on par with the 14900K. AMD has beaten the 14900K with the 7800X3D, and is working to release its 9800X3D chip soon. This could mean that Intel may not hold onto the gaming performance crown for the second generation in a row. The multithreaded performance numbers appear encouraging, but the number of tests presented are limited. Intel has deprecated HTT for the P-cores, making this a 24-thread processor, compared to the 32-thread i9-14900K and the competing Ryzen 9 9950X. Intel's gamble has been that the significantly increased IPC of the E-cores and moderately increased IPC of the P-cores could make up the deficit of HTT, but further testing remains across a much broader set of benchmarks.

Another semi-missed opportunity by Intel has been the NPU. It's notable that the company deployed the 13 TOPS NPU from Meteor Lake, which does plenty of cool things in Microsoft Teams, and some other lightweight AI tasks, but not having NPU 4 or Copilot+ native acceleration will be felt, especially given how Copilot is at the center of pretty much everything Microsoft is currently doing with Windows. However, this is still better than Ryzen 9000 series, which completely lacks an NPU, and instead has CPU core-level instructions relevant to AI workloads.

Intel is hoping for a win. The company may be holding on to its market share in all its client and data-center markets, but investors don't seem too happy with Intel stock. The company needs to gain the confidence of these investors, and the success of Arrow Lake will play a big role.

If you'd like to check out Intel's complete launch slide deck, click on the button below.