Although Intel hasn’t confirmed reports of an Arrow Lake refresh, rumors have circulated for months that we’d see one in the second half of 2025. Now that we’re in July, a little more info on the possible refresh is available for the beleaguered CPU.
As Wccftech points out, refreshed Intel CPUs typically get a bump in clock speed. That’s the expectation for this refresh, which should provide somewhat better performance. But we doubt that Intel would bother with a refresh just for a faster clock—especially in this climate, where AI is everything and Arrow Lake is sadly lacking.
At the moment, the Core Ultra 200S series doesn’t quite provide the 13 TOPS needed for CoPilot PCs. Intel apparently plans to solve the AI problem for Arrow Lake by adding the NPU4 from Lunar Lake. As Wccftech notes, that could bring the refreshed CPU’s TOPs performance to 48, giving it the AI muscle the chip needs.
Nova Lake. Credit: Intel
We won’t know just how much performance improvement the refreshed CPU provides until the launch, but it sounds as though it will be a minor improvement bump. Gaming improvement, if any, will likely be minimal. That said, it’s worth remembering that Intel already gave its Core Ultra 200 CPUs serious attention to gaming performance.
When concerns arose shortly after the processor’s launch in late 2024, Intel created a list of issues and set out a plan for addressing them. That included a brutal Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) problem that turned out to be an issue with some anti-cheat software, rather than Intel’s hardware.
Intel packed its fixes into BIOS updates and soon had its Arrow Lake CPUs providing much better gaming benchmark results. Intel quietly kept its attention on improving gaming performance for the CPUs and released a new overclocking profile in April, geared at making Arrow Lake a better processor for gaming and in general. So long as you have an unlocked CPU and Intel XMP-supporting memory modules, you can give your PC a decent performance boost in a matter of minutes.
If Intel launches refreshed Arrow Lake CPUs this year, they might not have much time in the spotlight. Nova Lake desktop CPUs are on the way for 2026 with loads of cores, DDR5 8000 memory, and a chance to give Intel a win.
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