Intel’s CFO Confirms ‘Arrow Lake Refresh’ CPUs, But It Likely Won’t Address The Desktop Gap With AMD’s Ryzen CPUs

Sep 6, 2025 at 12:56pm EDT
Intel Core Ultra 9 285K 24 Core CPU Benchmarked In CPU-Z & Blender, Up To 19% Faster, Both Ultra 7 265K & Ultra 5 245K Tested Too 1

Intel is officially preparing for a refresh of the Arrow Lake CPU lineup, as CFO David Zinsner reveals that SKUs are expected to drop before Nova Lake, likely by the end of this year.

Intel's Arrow Lake Refresh CPUs Will Drop Soon As The Firm's Last Attempt Towards LGA 1851

Well, it seems like Team Blue is preparing for an Arrow Lake Refresh lineup, and Intel's CFO David Zinsner confirmed this while speaking to Citi. He was asked about Intel's sluggish performance in the desktop CPU segment and how they have widened the competitive gap from the likes of AMD. In response, here's what Intel's CFO had to say:

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We still have some work to do on the client side on the portfolio. We have Arrow Lake in the desktop space. There's another wave of Arrow Lake that we'll see. But it's not till Nova Lake that really, I think we have completely addressed that situation.

This is the first time Intel has mentioned the presence of an Arrow Lake Refresh lineup, since before that, it was limited to leaks and rumors. Interestingly, based on what we know, Intel is preparing to revamp both Arrow Lake-S and Arrow Lake-HX desktop and mobile platforms, an approach similar to what we saw with Raptor Lake SKUs. However, the interesting point is that apart from clock speed changes, we aren't looking much towards the newer SKUs in terms of performance.

The situation around Intel's Arrow Lake chips hasn't been quite optimal since the firm has brought up disappointing performance, to say the least. The firm is trying to get things back on track by introducing elements like APO, fine-tuning memory performance, and making small efforts to try to get customers switching to the ARL platform, but by the looks of it, it hasn't played out as expected. And now, Intel will try to do something with Arrow Lake Refresh, but the optimism isn't there, and that will likely be restored with next-gen Nova Lake SKUs.

In terms of when Arrow Lake Refresh models could arrive, they will most likely debut by year-end, somewhere in Q4, since it will allow motherboard manufacturers and Intel to clear out LGA 1851 inventory before switching to the newer and advanced platform.

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