Arrow Lake Refresh to be released with more than just a clock speed increase
A new edition of the Core Ultra 200S is to be released by the end of the year. Apparently it will include a more powerful AI unit.
Intel is said to have changed its mind again regarding the rumored new edition of its current desktop processors Core Ultra 200S aka Arrow Lake-S. While the Arrow Lake refresh was recently considered to have been discontinued, a presentation by the end of the year is now once again on the cards. The back and forth would come as no surprise in view of the recent changes in leadership.
According to this, Intel wants to increase the clock frequencies slightly on the one hand and use a new so-called SoC tile on the other. This chiplet houses the AI unit (Neural Processing Unit, NPU), memory controller and I/O interfaces such as USB and PCI Express, among other things.
The NPU of the Arrow Lakes refresh is set to become significantly more powerful. This was already reported in March by "金猪升级包" on the Chinese platform Weibo. He is considered to be well-connected when it comes to desktop hardware. ZDNet Korea recently took the same line.
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New chiplet
The previous Core Ultra 200S, such as the Core Ultra 9 285K, have to make do with the SoC tile of the mobile Meteor Lake processors (Core Ultra 100U/H). The NPU in it manages 11 trillion INT8 computing operations per second (11 tops), which is only sufficient for shallow tasks. The Arrow Lake refresh should inherit the NPU of the Lunar Lake family (Core Ultra 200V), i.e. achieve 45 tops. That would be enough to qualify for Microsoft's Copilot+.
Intel would probably have to design a new SoC tile for such a combination. Lunar Lake does not have a pure SoC tile, but integrates the NPU in the compute chiplet together with the CPU cores. This makes it unsuitable for an Arrow Lake refresh
This would provide an opportunity for further upgrades, such as for Thunderbolt 5 and Wi-Fi 7. The new edition could already appear as the Core Ultra 300S. Meanwhile, the next real generation will not arrive until the end of 2026 and is called Nova Lake.
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