Intel confirms Core Ultra 9 290K Plus flagship CPU refresh isn't happening - and I'm hardly surprised

If there was any doubt about whether Intel might sneak out a revamped flagship as part of Arrow Lake Refresh, we've heard news that this definitely isn't happening.

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As noticed by VideoCardz, German tech site PC Games Hardware got word from Intel directly that the Core Ultra 9 290K Plus won't be inbound, and there won't be a 'special edition' of Intel's top chip (typically labelled a 'KS').

Intel told PC Games Hardware:

"The Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus are positioned to deliver outstanding gaming performance and incredible value compared to our competition. Our objective was to maximize performance for the desktop SKUs that are most widely available. As a result, Intel is not launching a U9 290K Plus SKU."

The focus for Arrow Lake Refresh is the more mainstream offerings, then, and the enthusiast territory isn't involved here.

There were samples of the 290K supposedly kicking about, or at least benchmarks of such a chip surfaced in Geekbench, so this could have been a planned CPU from Intel that was ditched at a late stage.

That'd fit with the current climate and ongoing component crisis, which has spread beyond RAM and storage to affect other hardware - the latest of which we're hearing about is processors.

Word from the grapevine is that Intel and AMD are set to hike the prices of their CPUs considerably, as AI and servers are prioritized over the needs of consumers. So, against that theoretical backdrop, doing away with a high-end Arrow Lake refresh makes sense - and it remains to be seen how much stock of the two mainstream CPUs, the 250K and 270K, we'll see actually on the shelves. And whether the asking prices will be at the tempting MSRPs.