The latest influx of Intel Arrow Lake rumours make me cautiously hopeful about desktop and mobile processors for a change

It's been such a rough year for CPUs, especially for Intel, that I feel like a scared dog tentatively approaching a treat when I hear rumblings about upcoming processors. It's part of the reason I don't like to cover too many rumours, because I don't want others suffering the same potential disappointment. But these latest ones have rekindled the slightest glimmer of hope inside me.

Here's the latest, in short. Firstly, we might now know some clock speeds of entry-level and mid-range Arrow Lake-S desktop CPUs thanks to an apparent leak conveyed by X user Raichu (via VideoCardz). And they're decent considering other rumoured architectural and efficiency improvements.

Secondly, there's renewed reason to look towards a powerful Arrow Lake Halo mobile processor, because it's been mentioned in a shipping manifesto at NBD.ltd (via Wccftech) and has seemingly been confirmed by a Lenovo PR (via VideoCardz).

Arrow Lake looks to be just a few weeks away, and I bet Intel's got its fingers (possibly even its toes) crossed for a great launch. After layoffs, Arm share liquidation, Raptor Lake stability issues, and a dropped 2024 invitation event, tides must surely now be ready to turn for chipzilla.

While one can only hope, these latest rumours do point in a positive direction for a change. Let's start with the Arrow Lake-S specs. The clock speeds most relevant to gamers are rumoured to be as follows:

We don't know precisely how the new Core Ultra nomenclature will stack the chips up compared to previous i5/i7/i9 nomenclature, so it's hard to know exactly which chips to compare these to. But given they're not Core Ultra 7 or 9 chips, we can probably compare them to i3 and i5 chips.

In which case, these numbers look pretty good. The current-gen Intel Core i5 14600K has a boost clock of 5.3 GHz and the Core i5 14400 has a boost clock of 4.7 GHz. Which means these rumoured Arrow Lake-S clock speeds are pretty much in-line with current-gen chips.

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