Once rumored dead, 42-core Intel desktop CPU architecture is reportedly back on the menu

Intel is no stranger to canceling CPU architectures, at least according to leaks. Just last year, reports were aplenty that the company had dismantled Jim Keller’s Royal Core project as well as the upcoming Arrow Lake-S refresh. With the alleged cancellation of the Arrow Lake Refresh, it appeared that Intel would have no answer to AMD’s Zen 5X3D and maybe even Zen 6 until Nova Lake.

However, it is now reported that the Intel Arrow Lake Refresh is alive.

According to Golden Pig Upgrade Pack on Weibo, the Intel Arrow Lake-S Refresh for desktops and Arrow Lake-HX Refresh for mobile are back from the dead. The ARL-S Refresh will use the same interface as the current Core Ultra 200 desktop chips. So, users who are rocking an LGA 1851 motherboard won’t need to shell out for a new one.

Additionally, the leaker claims that AI PCs “are getting bigger and stronger”. Since this is a machine translation, we might be missing some context here, but it looks like both the Arrow Lake S and Arrow Lake HX Refresh will pack more capable NPUs and, possibly, more cores.

Sadly, we don’t have any recent information regarding the specs of the Arrow Lake-S Refresh and Arrow Lake-HX Refresh chips. However, we do have some hardware details to go over from a Moore’s Law Is Dead leak from 2023.

Per MLID, the Arrow Lake-S Refresh can pack up to 42 total cores with a mixture of 8 Lion Cove P-cores, 32 Skymont E-cores, and 2 LP E-cores. Since ARL-R is likely to launch without any form of Hyper-Threading, this top SKU will be limited to 42 threads.

Naturally, such a high core count is likely to bring a big multi-core performance improvement. MLID’s estimate stands at 30-50%. The single-core performance gain, however, is only a single-digit percentage improvement.

That said, we are not sure how much of this leak still holds up, as it is more than 1.5 years old. So, take the information with a giant grain of salt.

All in all, the existence of Arrow Lake-S Refresh and Arrow Lake-HX Refresh is quite good news for Intel fans who haven’t had enough to celebrate over the past months. AMD is dominating the desktop CPU segment without any real resistance from Intel. Team Red just launched its newest Ryzen 9 9950X3D and Ryzen 9 9900X3D as productivity CPUs that also bring chart-topping gaming performance.