With Intel’s new Core Ultra 200 lineup done and settled for the time being, what’s next coming from Team Blue? According to leaker Golden Pig Upgrade (金猪升级包), the chipmaker is considering a refresh for Arrow Lake for the next generation, which at one point was off the cards.
Arrow Lake Refresh For Core Ultra 300?
Here’s the backstory: back in last September, the leaker reported that Arrow Lake Refresh (specifically, ARL-S and ARL-HX, serving desktop and high-end laptop chips respectively) was cancelled, alleging that needing to update the SoC tile for the sake of AI just for the refresh simply isn’t worth it. Of course, the recent leak indicates that Intel have seemingly changed plans:
I heard [Arrow Lake] Refresh is cheating death again, this is just going back and forth
Golden Pig Upgrade via Weibo (translated)
That said, this is the only information given for now, so it’s hard to say exactly how much of the Core Ultra 300 lineup will be Arrow Lake Refresh. The leak from last year does seem to indicate that it’ll be for desktops and high-performance gaming laptops, while the rest will likely be powered by Panther Lake – the mobile-only successor to Arrow Lake, before both eventually merge again under the Nova Lake architecture for Core Ultra 400 series.
Pokdepinion: Arrow Lake is mostly a dud right now – I doubt a refresh will help. If it is indeed just updated AI hardware, I imagine it’s not going to be competitive against whatever AMD has prepared up next.
