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Intel confirmed at a recent Goldman Sachs Technology conference that it plans to launch a refresh of its Arrow Lake processors "next year," with its true next-generation Nova Lake designs to follow along before the end of 2026, as per a transcript of the presentation. Although this likely means at least another year of AMD's Ryzen 9000 CPUs holding the gaming performance crown, Intel maintains that it's "confident in the road map," as it stands.

The statement came from Intel's Corporate Vice President, Investor Relations, John Pitzer. He said: "We've got a couple of holes we've got to fill on the desktop front. But quite frankly, we feel confident in the road map [...] We'll have a refresh of Arrow Lake next year, which will help start the process on the desktop side, and then we'll conclude that with Nova Lake when we launch late next year into 2027."

We've been hearing hints about a refresh of the Core Ultra 200 generation of CPUs for some time now, with various rumors about what it might involve. Improved binning and clock speed tweaks should result in a higher boost clock for CPUs involved in the refresh, though that may be limited to just K and KF-series models if some rumors are to be believed.

There was some talk about Intel introducing a newer, more capable neural processing unit (NPU) for AI workloads, but the most recent reports suggest that this is no longer happening, or was never officially planned.

The upgraded Core Ultra 200 CPUs are expected to maintain the same core counts, though we may see increased power limits in some models.

A 2026 launch for such a refresh, though, feels quite late. By the middle of 2026, Intel's Arrow Lake generation will be almost two years old, and AMD will likely be well on its way to launching its next-generation Zen 6 CPUs. Although some recent rumors suggest mobile Zen 6 CPUs might not launch until 2027, giving Intel some breathing room to launch Nova Lake, the desktop versions should arrive before the end of the year. AMD will release more concrete roadmap details this November, giving us a clearer outline of what to expect over the next 18 months.

Whether Zen 6 and Nova Lake debut before the end of 2026 or just after, though, that's not a huge lead time for any Arrow Lake refresh processors to gain much ground. They'd need to be notably faster than existing Core Ultra 200 CPUs to be particularly relevant, so far from the original launch date, and pricing would need to be exceedingly favorable to attract buyers who can see so many shiny next-generation CPUs just over the horizon. Especially since Nova Lake is expected to use an entirely new socket, severely limiting upgrade paths for Arrow Lake buyers.

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