Skip to main content

Intel Arrow Lake gets possible pricing and release date

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger presents Intel's roadmap including Arrow Lake, Lunar Lake, and Panther Lake.
Intel

We haven’t even gotten an official release date for Intel Arrow Lake, but the one we know of is already being pushed back. Many leaks pointed to an October 10 release, but now, one source claims that Intel won’t launch its next-gen top desktop processors until October 24. This only applies to the K and KF-series CPUs — the non-K variants won’t arrive until much later. We’ve also gotten a peek at some of the possible pricing.

Fortunately, the delay doesn’t appear to be major. According to HKEPC on X (formerly Twitter), the launch of Intel Arrow Lake-S has now been pushed back from October 17 to October 24. This is somewhat inconsistent with previous leaks, but not really — it appears that Intel had always planned to announce Arrow Lake on October 10, with availability starting on October 17. Now, we might still hear about the CPUs on October 10, but they won’t appear on the shelves until two weeks later.

Recommended Videos

⚠️Latest news: ⚠️

The Intel Arrow Lake-S processor release has been delayed by one week to October 24th.

— HKEPC (@hkepcmedia) September 10, 2024

It’s unlikely that this delay is indicative of any hardware issues; we’d have to wait a lot longer if that was the case. However, if Intel wants to spend an extra week perfecting the software, it’s not a bad idea. I’m sure Intel desperately wants to avoid another instability fiasco like what we’ve experienced in Raptor Lake CPUs.

There’s more, though. Seeing as we don’t have a release date or confirmed specs, the prices of Arrow Lake-S are mostly a mystery — except that a couple of retailers opened their preorders early. User momomo_us on X posted some listings from PC Canada, which is now selling the 285K, 265K, and 245K, as well as their KF variants. All of them appear to be out of stock. The retailer spilled the beans on some of the specs.

🇨🇦 pic.twitter.com/NBpWZlkI09

— 188号 (@momomo_us) September 9, 2024

As shared by VideoCardz, the prices and specs are as follows:

  • Core Ultra 9 285K: 848 CAD ($625); 24 cores and a clock speed of up to 5.7GHz
  • Core Ultra 7 265K: 585 CAD ($432); 20 cores and up to 5.5GHz. The KF variant is around $20 cheaper.
  • Core Ultra 5 245K: 447 CAD ($330); 14 cores and up to 5.2GHz. The KF variant is around $15-$17 cheaper.

LambdaTek, a U.K. retailer, also listed the CPUs ahead of time, as spotted by ghost_motley on X. For comparison, the Core Ultra 9 285K was priced at 472 British pounds, which is around $615. This means that we might have an accurate ballpark here, but we won’t know for sure until Intel itself makes it official.

Core Ultra 9 285K pic.twitter.com/xnlsRtAQTH

— Charlie (@ghost_motley) September 6, 2024

Although Intel unveiled the new Lunar Lake processors during IFA 2024, Arrow Lake received next to zero attention during the showcase. The only thing we found out with any certainty was that Arrow Lake wouldn’t utilize Intel’s — now canceled — 20A node. The chip will be made by “external partners,” presumably TSMC. Leakers point to a 5% to 15% performance increase over Raptor Lake.

Monica J. White
Monica is a computing writer at Digital Trends, focusing on PC hardware. Since joining the team in 2021, Monica has written…
AMD Ryzen AI claimed to offer ‘up to 75% faster gaming’ than Intel
A render of the new Ryzen AI 300 chip on a gradient background.

AMD has just unveiled some internal benchmarks of its Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor. Although it's been a few months since the release of the Ryzen AI 300 series, AMD now compares its CPU to Intel's Lunar Lake, and the benchmarks are highly favorable for AMD's best processor for thin-and-light laptops. Let's check them out.

For starters, AMD compared the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 to the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V. The AMD CPU comes with 12 cores (four Zen 5 and eight Zen 5c cores) and 24 threads, as well as 36MB of combined cache. The maximum clock speed tops out at 5.1GHz, and the CPU offers a configurable thermal design power (TDP) ranging from 15 watts to 54W. Meanwhile, the Intel chip sports eight cores (four performance cores and four efficiency cores), eight threads, a max frequency of 4.8GHz, 12MB of cache, and a TDP ranging from 17W to 37W. Both come with a neural processing unit (NPU), and AMD scores a win here too, as its NPU provides 50 trillion operations per second (TOPS), while Intel's sits at 47 TOPS. It's a small difference, though.

Read more
Intel admits defeat on Arrow Lake — but it’s not down for the count
intel core ultra 5 245k review 4

Intel's Arrow Lake CPUs aren't off to a great start. As you can read in our Core Ultra 9 285K review and Core Ultra 5 245K review, Intel's latest CPUs miss the mark across productivity and gaming apps, and they're miles away from some of the best processors you can buy right now. According to Intel, there are several issues with the new platform that it plans to address within a matter of weeks.

In an interview with HotHardware, Intel's Robert Hallock was blunt about the release of Arrow Lake CPUs: "The launch didn't go as planned ... we have a number of things we got to go fix." Hallock, formerly of AMD, is near the top of Intel's technical marketing division. Although he didn't address exactly what's wrong with Arrow Lake, Hallock promised that Intel is working on updates that could significantly improve performance, and that they'll arrive in a matter of weeks.

Read more
The sales numbers for Intel’s new chips are just depressing
A render for an Intel Arrow Lake CPU.

Intel's latest Arrow Lake-based Core Ultra 200S processors have been off to a rocky debut, receiving middling reviews from hardware testers, including from our own testing.

But according to recent sales data from Mindfactory, Germany’s leading online PC hardware retailer, not a single Core Ultra 200-series CPU has been sold so far. Meanwhile, AMD continues to dominate with 95% of Mindfactory’s CPU market share.

Read more