Following Intel’s decision to cancel its Meteor Lake desktop processors, it’s now up to the company’s Core Ultra 2 series (codenamed Arrow Lake) to deliver a true successor to its Raptor Lake chips following the disappointing launch of its 14th Gen Core series. In a bullish move, Intel has confirmed its plans to launch new desktop CPUs before the end of the year, alongside new Lunar Lake mobile processors.
While Intel still features prominently among our best CPU recommendations, the company is certainly on the back foot in many respects. However, with a new core architecture behind it built on a more modern and efficient manufacturing process, there’s every chance Arrow Lake could turn the tides for Intel.
In an attempt to steal the spotlight from Microsoft’s CoPilot Plus PC announcement, Intel shared a cornucopia of details on its upcoming Lunar Lake architecture as well as some nods to Arrow Lake during a recent preview event. Most exciting, though, is their expected release windows, with Lunar Lake arriving in Q3 2024 and Arrow Lake following shortly after in Q4 2024.
Intel stopped short of picking a particular month, but we strongly suspect we’ll see the likes of Core Ultra 9 285K and its siblings by mid-November. This lines up with previous launches, namely 12th and 13th Gen Core series, which released November 4, 2021 and October 20, 2022, respectively. It also gives these chips a chance at being Christmas presents, if you’ve been good this year.
Hopeful as we are that Intel will come out swinging with Arrow Lake, the apparent lack of hyper–threading, according to rumours, does give us pause. Intel will reportedly give more details about Lunar and Arrow Lake at Computex 2024, where it should explain how it plans to maintain high levels of performance without hyperthreading. It’s not all doom and gloom, though, as these chips will be the first to feature Xe2 iGPUs, the same architecture that’ll appear in Battlemage graphics cards.
Expect Club386 coverage of Computex direct from the show floor in the coming weeks. Until then, check out our Core i9 14900K review, to acquaint yourself with Intel’s best (and hottest) processor yet.