It might just be Raptor Lake Refresh all over again: recent information from leaker Jaykihn on X (Twitter) has clarified that the upcoming Arrow Lake Refresh – expected to supersede the current Arrow Lake lineup – will only receive minor clock speed increases, with the rest staying as-is. This differs from earlier rumor that the new chips were set to receive NPU upgrades.
Arrow Lake Refresh: Clock Bumps Only, Not Much Else
A quick backstory: earlier this month, ZDNet Korea reported that Intel will give Arrow Lake Refresh clock speed boosts and new ‘NPU4’ neural processor, enabling the new lineup to qualify for Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC requirements, which includes an NPU with at least 45 TOPS of compute power. This would enable some AI-enhanced features such as webcam background blur and basic level of content generation.
The new leak disputes this and claims that only clock speed will get a small increase – just like Raptor Lake Refresh (14th Gen) was to the Raptor Lake (13th Gen) chips. The lack of upgraded NPU in gaming PC contexts don’t mean a whole lot today, since there are very little practical use for these units given that most AI-related features in a gaming PC will be handled by a GPU anyway, especially if it is an NVIDIA card.
So expect this year to be a slow one for Team Blue, and from the ZDNet’s report, we’ll be only seeing five new models from the new lineup (for desktop segments, at least). This will also be the final generation of desktop processors compatible with the current LGA1851 socket, which will be replaced by LGA1954 and significantly-upgraded Nova Lake processors.
Pokdepinion: Safe to assume Intel wants to get Nova Lake ready as soon as possible.
