Will Arrow Lake live up to Intel’s promises? We could find out on October 10, with CPUs going on sale soon

Intel’s Arrow Lake processors will hit the shelves in three weeks, if the latest from the rumor mill is correct.

VideoCardz cites multiple sources who have told the tech site Intel’s intended launch schedule for the next-gen desktop CPUs, backed up by a well-known hardware leaker on X, namely @wnxod (as flagged by Tom’s Hardware).

The theory is that Intel has a prelaunch press briefing set up for October 7, the start of next week, and then the reveal of Arrow Lake (Core Ultra 200) processors follows on October 10. After that, the on-sale date is set for October 24, or so we’re told.

Intel’s Z890 motherboards – premium efforts which will cost a pretty penny in the case of high-end boards, equipped with the new socket for Arrow Lake, LGA 1851 – will also be revealed at the same time.

In other words, you’ll need one of these new motherboards to use an Arrow Lake processor – they won’t fit in the existing socket for current 700 series motherboards for Intel chips (LGA 1700).

Analysis: Matching with existing rumors – to a point

We haven’t got long to wait, then, until we witness the official reveal of Intel’s Arrow Lake processors, complete with Team Blue’s internal benchmarking no doubt, next week on October 10 as mentioned.

At least if all this is correct, and note that this purported reveal date of October 10 chimes with what we’ve heard previously, giving it a bit more weight. That said, past chatter indicated this would be followed by the Core Ultra 200 chips hitting shelves on October 17. Apparently this has now been delayed a week (or the former info was wrong), but it’s hardly unusual to have a two week gap between the unveiling of CPUs and the processors going on sale.

Of course, we say the previous info may have been incorrect, but we need to take this new rumor with seasoning too (let’s face it – the new dates could be entirely off the mark for all we know). However, with multiple sources seeming to converge on the new dates, they seem a fair enough bet.

Initially, Intel will only launch ‘K’ models for the Core Ultra 200 family, headed up by the flagship Core Ultra 9 285K – those are CPUs which are unlocked, and so can be overclocked by PC enthusiasts. Vanilla non-K chips, which have their clock speeds locked so they can’t be juiced up in this way, are expected to follow in Q1 of 2025 (and we recently caught a telling glimpse of the performance of the Core Ultra 9 285).

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