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.
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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.
— 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.
