New Arrow Lake rumors are a real concern - might Intel struggle to get these CPUs out in 2024?

Intel's Arrow Lake CPUs have been the subject of plenty of rumors of late, as release nears - but is the launch all that close? Not according to the latest chatter from the grapevine.

YouTuber Moore's Law is Dead (MLID) has been filling us in with his most recent findings on the performance and release timeframe for Intel's next-gen desktop CPUs, and it isn't good news (well - unless you're AMD).

According to the leaker, Arrow Lake will launch in either November or December, and the latter month was also floated as an on-sale date recently in another rumor (we'll come back to that).

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This is notably later than we were expecting, as given a rumored September unveiling for the Core Ultra 200 CPUs, we were hopeful the release might come earlier in Q4 rather than later (all Intel has said officially is the chips will land in that final quarter).

Certainly, Intel needs to get Arrow Lake silicon out there - given that by the end of 2024, we'll likely have Zen 5 X3D spins from AMD, and Ryzen 9000 processors are about to launch - but we may only see the very top-end CPUs from Intel this year, according to MLID.

The leaker elaborates that it'll just be the "top desktop gaming chips" (K unlocked models) coming this year, although that's not exactly unexpected. However, what will raise eyebrows is the forecast that the majority of the Arrow Lake line-up won't debut until H1 2025. That's a worryingly wide timeframe that hints that early 2025, or even Q1 next year, may not be in the cards for non-K chips.

Also a concern is MLID's contention that some sources still think it'll be a "miracle" if Intel manages to even launch the K SKUs to desktop in December 2024. This is not sounding very positive, overall, and as noted, neither has other recent speculation on Arrow Lake's launch schedule. (See the below post on X, which also comes with a claim that the next-gen CPUs will only be in QS testing in October 2024).

A big performance leap?

There's better news with MLID's latest word on performance, which will supposedly be a 15% to 25% IPC uplift compared to current-gen. That translates into 10% to 20% faster single-threaded performance, and a 20% to 35% increase in multi-threaded performance compared to Raptor Lake Refresh.

Interestingly, MLID isn't fully confident on the latter figures (the IPC prediction is more solid, the leaker notes), simply because the clock speeds, TDP and voltage are still being tinkered with by Intel (and the microcode worked on). Again, this is an indication that Arrow Lake desktop isn't that close, of course.

That said, if the prediction figures come true at the higher-end of the expected range, roughly 20% and 35% boosts on single and multi-core respectively with Arrow Lake would obviously be an impressive leap for Intel.

Although given the current controversy around Core i9s (13900K and 14900K) and instability, the notion of Intel pushing its next-gen chips for performance, and potentially trying to rush Arrow Lake to meet the Q4 release deadline - and compete with Ryzen 9000, and maybe 9000 X3D - well, that doesn't fill us with confidence for the incoming CPUs.

It's another worry here, in short, and MLID touches on Arrow Lake being clocked lower than Raptor Lake Refresh - which has always been rumored, of course - but maybe not all that much lower (and of course, the same goes for the TDP, potentially, but remember - these decisions haven't been made yet).

Between this, and the debacle around unstable Core i9s which has been further stoked this week by the findings of another YouTuber, Level1Techs, who has been combing through game crash logs - well, things aren't looking great for Intel, let's put it that way.