Intel Arrow Lake looks set for a September launch – but that might be too late in the battle of next-gen CPUs against AMD Ryzen 9000

Next-gen clash of the desktop chips is already becoming a tense affair

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Intelhas announced that it’ll hold its Innovation event late in September, and it’s likely that this will be where we see the revelation ofArrow Lake, Team Blue’s next-gen desktop chips.

VideoCardzreports that Intel has told us the date to mark in our calendars for the annual event, with Innovation 2024 set to run from September 24 to 25 in San Jose, California.

Over the past few years, Intel Innovation is where we’ve witnessed the initial launch of Team Blue’s Alder Lake processors (2021), then Raptor Lake (2022), and last year Meteor Lake was shown off (as well as Raptor Lake Refresh).

Note that these were announcements rather than products going on sale, which always happens a bit later.

With Intel recently having confirmed that aQ4 launch is still in the cards for Arrow Lake– with later in 2024 having been the target release timeframe for some time now – late September seems perfectly placed for an initial reveal on the next-gen desktop CPUs.

Analysis: Rising to the Ryzen challenge

Indeed, not only does Intel Innovation seem a likely prospect for this launch, it’s really a must for Team Blue to publicly show off Arrow Lake by this point in time. Well, certainly if the rumors aroundAMD’s rival next-gen processors are correct, with Ryzen 9000 seemingly due to hit the shelves as early as July, if theextremely fresh gossip from the grapevineis right. (And it’s fair to say that gossip has been backed up by a lot of other recent chatter, not the least frommotherboard makers busy preparing the ground for those Zen 5 chips).

If this AMD rumor pans out, Intel needs to be very careful not to drag its feet in launching Arrow Lake. And in all honesty, even if these processors aren’t ready, if Ryzen 9000 goes on sale in July, Intel will need to make some kind of announcement just to save face, really. If a worst-case scenario happens where Arrow Lake is going to beverylate in 2024, Intel will need to keep the hype stoked in some manner, for sure.

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Intel has got some big gun processors lined up for later this year. Not just Arrow Lake, but also let’s not forget Lunar Lake for Copilot+ PCs, too, boasting power-efficiency in spades forthin-and-light laptops– so it might just be the company is planning to fire off a major salvo at Innovation. Indeed, it would seem a missed opportunity not to do so, even if Arrow Lake isn’t as ready as Intel would ideally like as Q4 comes into view…

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Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

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