Intel Arrow Lake Refresh Is Reportedly Launching In The Second Half Of 2025, Featuring “Slightly” Higher Performance

The Refreshed Arrow Lake processors are rumored to launch this year later and will bring improvements in both clocks and NPU.

Arrow Lake Refresh Rumored to Bring NPU4 to Bring Superior AI Performance; Will Also Get Higher Clocks

Intel is reportedly preparing the Arrow Lake Refresh for a 2H 2025 launch. We have previously reported on this but it hasn’t been confirmed by Intel yet. From various reports, it appears that Intel is continuing its plans to bring slightly superior Arrow Lake-S desktop chips, and one can expect “slightly” better performance than the current gen.

As ZDNET Korea reports, the Arrow Lake Refresh is releasing this year. The exact date is unknown but as Intel prepares for the Nova Lake S for 2026 launch, it’s expected that the Arrow Lake Refresh will release before the end of this year. As per the report, the Refreshed series will receive a slight bump in the core clocks, which is obvious as this has been the trend among the older Refresh chips.

Do not expect it to be significantly better than the current Arrow Lake processors but as far as its AI performance is concerned, one can now expect a competitive prowess. The current Core Ultra 200S lineup doesn’t go beyond 13 NPU TOPS of performance, which disqualifies it from getting the Copilot+ certification. However, the newer lineup is reported to get the NPU4, which is also found on the Lunar Lake Core Ultra 200V processors.

With the NPU4, the Arrow Lake Refresh will be able to deliver up to 48 NPU TOPS of AI performance, which makes it qualified for the Copilot+ certification. That said, we don’t know if Intel is aiming for improvement in other areas, such as integrated graphics and memory compatibility. We originally speculated that the Arrow Lake Refresh should bring some good performance boost but this was based on the improvements we saw on the Raptor Lake Refresh, aka Core 200H series, which brought roughly 14% better single-core performance.

However, most reports suggest that it won’t be the case with the Arrow Lake Refresh and if that’s true, then we can’t expect this lineup to beat the Ryzen 9000 series chips let alone the 9000X3D if we consider gaming workloads.