Intel's next-gen Arrow Lake desktop CPUs are reportedly only 7 weeks away from launch

It's been an annus horriblis for Intel, with , , and to save money. So, you can bet your last dollar that the chip giant is hoping that its next generation of desktop CPUs, using the Arrow Lake-S architecture, will help in no small in reversing these fortunes. And according to one source, the launch date is October 10th, just 7 weeks away.

News of the impending release comes from tech site (via X user ), although it doesn't add much to the comment, other than an obligatory "according to the information we have gathered" statement.

I suspect that Intel planned to [[link]] announce Arrow Lake-S at its annual tech event in September, but as that's been postponed to next year, there's no longer any big platform to present the new architecture.

But since Intel can't afford to wait until 2025 to launch a new range of desktop CPUs, as it will want to move on from the Raptor Lake ruckus as quickly as possible, it would seem that the release will happen anyway. I'm not aware of any major tech events taking place, during the second week of October, so if the launch is then, it'll be quite an usual one for Intel.

BenchLife has also collated all the rumoured specifications for the Intel Core Ultra 200-series and there are certainly some surprises in store—for example, (Intel's name for SMT, simultaneous multithreading) so the highest tier processor maxes out at 24 threads.

Since K-variant chips tend to be the most popular with PC gamers, they're the ones to pay the most attention to. On paper, this might seem like a step back from what the current 14th Gen Raptor Lake chips have to offer.

But if those , then thread-for-thread, Arrow Lake could be much better. Of course, there are some applications which will just take as many threads as you can throw at [[link]] them (e.g. rendering) and AMD's Ryzen 9000-series, especially the , could well rule the roost.

There's nothing wrong with the gaming performance of Intel's CPUs, of course, but that's mostly been down to high clock speeds and a powerful, low-latency cache hierarchy.

I wouldn't worry too much about the claim that none of the Core Ultra 200-series exceeds 5.7 GHz as Intel's best 14th Gen chips rarely hit their top clocks in gaming.

The new processors aren't compatible with current LGA1700 motherboards and vendors have already been showing off some of their .

With AMD's , due to the relative lack of improvement over the 7000-series, Intel might be in a good position to steal the headlines, if Arrow Lake turns out to be the best processor for games.

Regardless of how everything will pan out, at least it doesn't look like we'll have much longer to wait to find out.