Intel’s soon-to-be-announced Arrow Lake Refresh family is already looking set to disappoint employees hoping for a significant step up. In another departure from previous reports, the fresh Arrow Lake CPUs won’t upgrade the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) at all. But the refresh will be just frequency updates, which will take it only slightly ahead of its predecessor.
The Arrow Lake Refresh chips were expected to feature NPU 4, akin to the Lunar Lake family that features much healthier 48 TOPS performance. But Intel is apparently sticking with NPU 3 for these CPUs if recent leaks are to be believed. This NPU generation, launched initially with the Meteor Lake chips in late-2023, offers a mere 11.5 TOPS and misses Copilot+ certification.
Well-known leaker Jaykihn, who has had a good record of delivering reliable Intel leaks, also verified that the Arrow Lake Refresh desktop and upper-end laptop SKUs will not be getting any NPU upgrades. This would indicate that the refresh CPUs will maintain the same number of cores, and just concentrate on delivering higher clock speeds. Intel hasn’t revealed the exact boost clocks, but the top-of-the-line Core Ultra 9 285K maxes out at just 5.5 GHz, a smidgen under the boost clocks found in Intel’s 14th Gen Core i7 and i9 CPUs today.
And Intel will also be callthe Arrow Lake Refresh its Core Ultra 200 series, and not launching a separate product line to replace it. Only certain SKUs — mostly the ‘K’ and ‘KF’ models — will receive these clock speed bumps. Other SKUs in the lineup could be left untouched.
With a new CEO (Lip-Bu Tan) in change at Intel the company has changed it’s main structure more than not, that may mean things like this proposed product announcement might not come to light. It looks like the Arrow Lake Refresh update is just a baby step, rather than a dramatic shift forward, that is bound to disappoint users as performance improvement from the NPU thing is now looking active.
The Arrow Lake Refresh portfolio from Intel is likely to be officially announced in the second half of 2025 but there is no word about the release date. For now, the bottom line is this: Arrow Lake Refresh won’t be much to write home about, and will largely lean on clock speed increases rather than architectural enhancements or new features.
