Intel’s Arrow Lake processors may not hit the market until late 2024, according to a new rumor.
This one comes from regular hardware leaker HXL and was shared on X in a very short statement informing us that Arrow Lake sales won’t start until December.
In case you’re wondering, ARL-S refers to Arrow Lake-S, with the “S” suffix denoting desktop processors (there will also be mobile Arrow Lake CPUs for notebooks, with higher-end models coming to complement Lunar Lake, next-generation laptop silicon that focuses on power efficiency).
We’ve already heard that the Arrow Lake desktop will arrive later in 2024, and recently Intel assured us that its next-generation processors will arrive in the fourth quarter – which could theoretically mean October.
With an announcement reportedly planned for September 2024, we had imagined a release the following month as the most likely scenario. However, if this latest speculation is true – and of course you should be skeptical of this and previous claims – that’s a pretty disappointing drop to the end of the year.
Analysis: Intel is not having a good time at the moment
Given Intel’s promise of a fourth-quarter release, a December launch would be the latest date by which Team Blue could bring Arrow Lake to market and compete for spots on our best CPUs list.
It’s also worth noting that another leaker (Harukaze5719) on X chimed in to point out an earlier rumor from Jaykihn that Arrow Lake’s “QS,” meaning “final qualification sample testing and validation,” is set for week 40 of 2024, the first week of October. This would align with a planned December sale date, and that’s a worrying indication that this new bearish prediction may be accurate.
If Arrow Lake comes out in December, what does that mean for Intel? Frankly, nothing good, as AMD is close to releasing its next-gen Ryzen 9000 CPUs (they’ll debut in late July). Given that, Intel would be five months behind with Arrow Lake if it doesn’t come out until the very end of the year – by which time Ryzen 9000 X3D will likely have come out, or if another rumor is true, even been out for some time.
On top of that, Intel is currently suffering from a PR nightmare as crashes on its newer Core i9 processors continue to be a sensitive and controversial topic. Whether Arrow Lake will fix these nasty problems remains to be seen, of course – but it’s a new socket and a different architecture, and the performance isn’t as high, so we can certainly hope.
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