Intel is reportedly planning to launch its Arrow Lake Refresh lineup of desktop CPUs sometime during the second half of this year. The lineup is expected to feature mild improvements over the current Arrow Lake-S lineup, which had a lacklustre launch back in October last year.
According to a report by ZDNet Korea, the Arrow Lake Refresh lineup is expected to include a new “NPU 4” silicon, which supposedly provides AI capabilities on par with those found on Copilot+ systems, such as its Lunar Lake lineup. For context, the current Arrow Lake already comes with an NPU, but isn’t the one that you find in Lunar Lake. Instead, it uses the same silicon first introduced with the launch of the Meteor Lake laptop CPU lineup, with a peak performance of 13 TOPS.
With the NPU 4 silicon, it is believed that the Arrow Lake Refresh will be more viable for AI workloads on par with Lunar Lake. As a refresher, Lunar Lake’s NPU has a peak performance of 48 TOPS, which means that it meets Microsoft’s requirements for its Copilot+ chatbot.
That said, ZDNet says that beyond the updated NPU 4, Arrow Lake Refresh will retain the same core configurations for all its SKUs at launch, along with slight increments to their base and boost clocks. And while it’s still early days for the lineup, the collective thought is that the lineup won’t deliver that great a performance boost over the current Arrow Lake lineup. Could the new NPU help? Probably, but again, it’s still too early to tell. Probably, we’ll be able to see it if and when Intel sends us our review units.
