Intel Arrow Lake CPUs are on track – and that’s crucial due to AMD’s big Ryzen 8000 threat

Intel’s upcoming processor ranges are all on track for launch – or even ahead of their planned schedule – the chip giant has assured us.

That’s according to what we were told in Intel’s earnings call for its Q2 2023 results, as Wccftech spotted.

Intel’s CEO Pat Gelsinger let us know: “I am pleased to report that all our programs are on or ahead of schedule. We remain on track for 5 nodes in 5 years and to regain transistor performance and power performance leadership by 2025.”

Intel’s next-gen chips, Meteor Lake (and we’ll also have Raptor Lake Refresh on the desktop) are on track for a second half of 2023 launch.

Gelsinger also said that Arrow Lake, the processors that’ll follow after those next-gen products, are entering the first stages of production (“running its first stepping in the fab,” so the initial samples are being made as we type).

Arrow Lake is on track for a 2024 launch, then, but exactly when the range of CPUs will turn up next year is pretty crucial (we’ll discuss why in a moment).

The other part of Intel’s processor plans for this year and next, Lunar Lake, is also mentioned as being on track for 2024. These will be power-efficient chips targeted at laptops, and from what we can gather on the grapevine, will be equivalent to something like Ice Lake (as discussed in a recent video from YouTube leaker Moore’s Law is Dead).

Analysis: Arrow Lake timing is key for Intel

It’s good for Intel that Arrow Lake is on track, because Team Blue really can’t afford slippage with this one – certainly not in the desktop arena. Previous chatter on the grapevine floated the idea that Intel may have been running into delays with these 15th-gen chips, but apparently this isn’t the case.

Why is Arrow Lake so important on desktop? Mainly because Raptor Lake Refresh this year (in October, most likely) is a pretty modest uplift – it’s a simple refresh, after all, notching clock speeds up a bit mainly (the 14700K may also get some extra efficiency cores).

And AMD’s Ryzen 8000 (Zen 5) processors are rumored to be possibly ready in Q3 of 2024, maybe even as soon as around the middle of the year. So, if Arrow Lake doesn’t come out until very late next year, that’ll leave Raptor Lake Refresh looking pretty shaky against Zen 5 desktop CPUs that speculation contends will be a pretty big leap forward.

True, Arrow Lake is also looking like a major leap for Intel – an even bigger jump than Ryzen 7000 to 8000, if the rumor mill is right – so both these ranges could do very well in our best processors ranking. However, if Ryzen 8000 comes out much earlier than Intel’s 15th-gen, then Team Blue could be looking at the erosion of some of the hard-won gains it’s made on desktop turf since Alder Lake (and hybrid technology) debuted.