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 , Nova Lake. That won't be enough, however as 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. , 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 , 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 [[link]] sense is everything else. Arrow Lake didn't exactly hit , with most being pretty underwhelmed by the chips. Even after the 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 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 [[link]] on-brand. Intel [[link]] has been known to , 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.