It's 2026, CES is over, and there's still no sign of Intel's Arrow Lake refresh, but one hardware channel is adamant it'll be here in the spring
After a rough few years, Intel has clearly been hoping for better times, and it's fair to say that the official launch of Panther Lake at CES 2026 was a major step in the right direction. However, while all the attention was focused on the new mobile chips, the distinct lack of anything about an Arrow Lake refresh has cast doubt over whether it will actually happen or not. One hardware channel, though, is claiming that it definitely will.
That's according to Golden Pig Upgrade on Weibo, as reported by Videocardz, which says that the launch of the Core Ultra 200 Plus range (the rumoured name for the Arrow Lake refresh chips) will arrive in either March or April (via machine translation).
Evidence for the refresh itself comes in the form of entries in the Geekbench database. For example, this Core Ultra 9 290K Plus was uploaded only a few days ago, though it's possible that it's not genuine (i.e. it's actually a Core Ultra 9 285K result with a rejigged name).
Six months ago, I readily accepted the suggestion that Intel was planning on doing an Arrow Lake refresh, if only because it's done that sort of thing many times before in the past. Core 14th Gen processors are simply regurgitated Core 13th Gen chips, albeit with a bit more poke here and there.
The problem now is one of time. It's getting very late for Intel to be releasing a new range of desktop and mobile processors, because its next architecture, Nova Lake, is still on track for appearing later this year. That's not a rumour, that's literally what Intel has been saying.
So if Arrow Lake refresh does appear in March/April, that means it will only have a few months in the limelight before the next generation of processors comes crashing in to spoil the party. And if everything we've heard about Nova Lake comes to pass, then you'd be bonkers to buy a Core Ultra 200 Plus chip.
I think it would make more sense to just abandon the whole idea for the desktop market, but stick with it for the laptop sector, where Intel's Core Ultra 200HX chips perform very well. Tweaked versions of those would be nice to see in a gaming laptop.
One good reason not to bother with a desktop refresh is the fact that the main upgrade for the Arrow Lake refresh is supposed to offer native support for much faster DDR5 RAM. You know, the stuff that's now absurdly expensive. Why would you buy a new processor that's only a smidge faster than the current Core Ultra 200S family when you can't afford to pick up the memory kit to go with it?
Of course, AMD's Zen 6 and Nova Lake are both going to face that issue when they appear, because there's no clear sign as to when the DRAM crisis is going to end. But at least they're going to be properly faster and more capable than the current generation of CPUs, rather than being just a teeny bit faster. Well, I hope they are, at least.
At the end of the day, I don't think it really matters whether or not the Arrow Lake refresh appears or not. Fine if it does, equally fine if it doesn't, because either way, it's not going to sell anywhere near as well as Nova Lake will.