Arrow Lake Refresh will be more disappointing than expected

Intel has been in a slump for a while but new CEO Lip-Bu Tan has been working to turn things around. Some major changes to the operations have been made since he took the reins that have affected the upcoming product launches. The company is planning to refresh its Arrow Lake portfolio of CPUs but if the latest leak is accurate, it is going to be an even minor upgrade than previously expected.

A report from early July mentioned that the Arrow Lake Refresh CPUs will bring faster clock speeds and a newer NPU. The Arrow Lake chips that include Core Ultra 200S desktop CPUs come with NPU 3, an older version that was first introduced with Meteor Lake chips back in late 2023. This NPU is only capable of 11.5 TOPS which negates it from being Copilot+ certified. The report stated that Arrow Lake Refresh will bring NPU 4, like the Lunar Lake chips, which is capable of 48 TOPS. Now, it looks like that will not be the case and Intel will be sticking with NPU 3 for the refresh.

Known leaker Jaykihn has been sharing information on the upcoming Arrow Lake Refresh for a while now and in his latest post, a response to one of his older insights, he claims that neither the desktop, nor the top-end laptop CPU SKUs will receive any NPU changes. This means the new CPUs will only get a clock speed boost, making it yet another minor update. This also suggessts that core counts are likely to remain the same as well.

As for the naming convention, Intel is expected to not use a new series for the Arrow Lake Refresh. This means they will remain under the Core Ultra 200 series banner. Furthermore, what is also disappointing is that not all SKUs in the lineup with be refreshed and only the ‘K’ and ‘KF’ SKUs are expected to get the special treatment.

It is unclear how much of a boost will be given to the clock speeds. For reference, the flagship Arrow Lake processor, Core Ultra 9 285K, has a boost clock of 5.5 GHz, which is lower than the 14th Gen Core i7 and Core i9 processors. That being said, Intel is expected to reveal the refreshed lineup sometime in the second half of this year, but there is no exact date as of yet.