Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Technology conference, Intel corporate vice president for investor relations John Pitzer admitted: “We've got a couple of holes we've got to fill on the desktop front. But quite frankly, we feel confident in the road map [...] We'll have a refresh of Arrow Lake next year, which will help start the process on the desktop side, and then we'll conclude that with Nova Lake when we launch late next year into 2027.”

Translated into plain English, that means Intel knows it’s behind, but hopes a bit of clock-speed fairy dust on Arrow Lake will keep the lights on until Nova Lake is ready. The “refresh” is rumoured to consist of slightly better binning, a few more MHz, with the same core counts and possibly higher power limits for those who fancy paying more for a hotter chip.

Talk of a shiny new neural processing unit for AI workloads seems to have vanished. Either it was never on the cards or Intel quietly stuffed it in a drawer marked “too hard.”

The bigger problem is timing. By mid-2026, Arrow Lake will be pushing two years old, while AMD’s Zen 6 desktop CPUs should already be sharpening their knives. Even if mobile Zen 6 waits until 2027, that leaves Intel trying to flog reheated silicon while the competition wheels out fresh designs.

Buyers may also think twice knowing Nova Lake will use a new socket, making Arrow Lake refresh chips about as appealing as buying a DVD player. Unless Intel slashes prices to silly levels, punters will probably sit on their wallets and wait.