News Intel prepping Arrow Lake Refresh with minor clock speed bump and new Copilot+ AI-compliant NPU lifted from Core Ultra 200V — reportedly launches i...

[Admin]

Intel is prepping an Arrow Lake refresh for the second half of this year, with chips expected to ships with a slight bump in clock speeds and an entirely new NPU focused on delivering Copilot+ AI prowess.

Intel prepping Arrow Lake Refresh with minor clock speed bump and new Copilot+ AI-compliant NPU lifted from Core Ultra 200V — reportedly launches i... : Read more

 

[hotaru251]

With AI features becoming more central to consumer usage,

X to doubt that claim.

 

[usertests]

It's still a boring refresh on the CPU side, but the interesting thing is that they are actually swapping a chiplet out for a new chiplet to get that 3x larger NPU. There is nothing stopping them from swapping in a newer iGPU or video block at the same time.

 

[DS426]

It's still a boring refresh on the CPU side, but the interesting thing is that they are actually swapping a chiplet out for a new chiplet to get that 3x larger NPU. There is nothing stopping them from swapping in a newer iGPU or video block at the same time.

Yep -- starting to see how Intel's tiles allow them to swap around bits and bobs, allowing refreshes to actually be a little more interesting, even if not really in this case with most not caring about more AI performance. Not so much on desktop but on mobile, an iGPU upgrade like you mentioned could spice things up.

 

[bit_user]

This is potentially good news, as the NPU resides in the same tile as the memory controller. If this change can do anything to improve memory latency, that should help with some of Arrow Lake's deficits.

Source: https://www.techpowerup.com/336412/inside-arrow-lake-intels-die-exposed-and-annotated
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I wonder if they'll be making room for the larger NPU by shifting some more PCIe lanes into the I/O tile, which could then use up some of the empty space in the lower-left corner. Otherwise, not only would the entire silicon area get larger, but the CPU cores would probably be pushed even further off-center.

 

[bit_user]

Safe bet that MS' 40 TOPS NPU will be a Win12 requirement.

I highly doubt it. MS probably faced enough backlash from obsoleting CPUs for Win 11. The last thing they need is to obsolete even new CPUs that someone could go out and buy today. That basically guarantees people will leave Windows in droves.

For Windows 13... maybe.

Edit 2: Perplexity is partially wrong (hah again!). Spot checks show that 4000 series do have TOPS specs listing, but not 2000 or 3000. So maybe 4000 GPUs will pass muster.

Edit 3: Radeon RX 9000 series likewise have TOPS listed, but not 7000 or 6000 series.

Or, maybe that Nvidia is still trying to sell some RTX 4000 inventory + RTX 5000 models, while AMD didn't have much to brag about until RX 9000.

The whole world doesn't revolve around Windows AI, you know? There can be things that have either nothing or very little to do with it.

 

[TerryLaze]

>...and an entirely new NPU focused on delivering Copilot+ AI prowess.

Just one more piece of the "Windows AI" puzzle falling into place. All new PCs by default will be AI PCs when new Windows rev launch next year (call it Win12). Safe bet that MS' 40 TOPS NPU will be a Win12 requirement.

Yeah no, all or at least most CPUs that will be made by that time will have enough TOPS but windows 12 will not require it.
The whole point of copilot and other marketing words is to make it clear that if you buy a PC without the buzzwords on it then it won't have it.

 

[thestryker]

I wonder if they'll be making room for the larger NPU by shifting some more PCIe lanes into the I/O tile, which could then use up some of the empty space in the lower-left corner. Otherwise, not only would the entire silicon area get larger, but the CPU cores would probably be pushed even further off-center.

My bet is node shrink since they're still using N6 for the SOC Tile. The LNL NPU (which seems to be the most likely candidate) is somewhere around double the size of the ARL one.

There is nothing stopping them from swapping in a newer iGPU or video block at the same time.

A new Graphics Tile seems very unlikely, but since there is a new SOC Tile then a new media engine isn't impossible.

 

[SomeoneElse23]

The whole world doesn't revolve around Windows AI, you know? There can be things that have either nothing or very little to do with it.

I don't know why anyone would want "AI" in their PC.

In today's internet connected world, *if* AI goes anywhere, and it's a big IF, online will be far better than anything you can get from a PC.

 

[TerryLaze]

I don't know why anyone would want "AI" in their PC.

In today's internet connected world, *if* AI goes anywhere, and it's a big IF, online will be far better than anything you can get from a PC.

I bet you anything that more people want A.I. on their PCs than there were people that wanted 20+ cores in their CPUs ,but here we are.

 

[TerryLaze]

>Yeah no, all or at least most CPUs that will be made by that time will have enough TOPS but windows 12 will not require it.

Exactly. All new PCs will have CPUs that qualify, and they will all come with Win 12. No requirement is needed.

The question is whether existing PCs will get a Windows upgrade to 12. MS made some HW requirement for 10->11 upgrade, and with Win12's crux being on AI, it's logical to carry the Copilot+ HW req over to Win12 req.

Put differently, if you have a Win11 box and you don't want AI, there's little point in upgrading to Win12. If you do want AI in Win, 40 TOPS is already a req now.

As said, it'll be interesting to see how MS handles the transition. For new non-AI Win12 features--are there any worth speaking of?--MS can do as it did for Win10, which is to backport certain features. Win11 25H2 has a 2-year update window, so it's good until '27. Depending on userbase uptake, MS can well extend the window for Win11 support.

>The whole point of copilot and other marketing words is to make it clear that if you buy a PC without the buzzwords on it then it won't have it.

Per above, this is superfluous for new PCs (in '26).

The last time before TPM that windows required new hardware was for 64bit ,
They are not doing it with every version just to annoy people.

MS is constantly adding hardware specific things without making it a requirement for the new version.
For example they added thread director for intel CPUs without forcing everybody to have a CPU that supports it.

 

[usertests]

I don't know why anyone would want "AI" in their PC.

In today's internet connected world, *if* AI goes anywhere, and it's a big IF, online will be far better than anything you can get from a PC.

Using online, centralized AI services instead of local means you are giving up privacy and limiting what you can prompt/generate based on whatever "guardrails" are in place.

You're certainly limited with an NPU, especially in comparison to powerful consumer graphics cards. But these 40-50 TOPS NPUs are probably all that you need to do some basic stuff like generate images and run the smaller LLMs in a timely manner. There are SoCs for image recognition that are more in the 1-5 TOPS range.

We will likely see next-gen Intel/AMD NPUs go to 100 TOPS. But if they are really not catching on within a couple of years, maybe Intel/AMD should simply provide more AI-optimized graphics compute units instead. This seems even more likely after AMD merges gaming and compute architectures back into "UDNA" and starts putting that in iGPUs.

 

[usertests]

Edit 3: Radeon RX 9000 series likewise have TOPS listed, but not 7000 or 6000 series.

I think this is down to the major AI improvements in RDNA4 and the newfound emphasis on it (for investors).

But yeah it's annoying that these TOPS ratings (which are estimates/averages to be honest) are hard to find. I'm also surprised that some of the relatively recent dGPUs (e.g. RTX 3060) are only around 100 TOPS INT8 supposedly.

 

[TerryLaze]

To sum it all up, yes, there's a possibility that Win12 will be plain jane Windows with AI being an "optional" add-on.

You are confusing notions here....
Even if A.I. is the main reason for windows 12 it doesn't mean that it will force you to have NPU, it just won't do any of the A.I. stuff.

Look how much of windows 10-11 depends on the internet, power down your router and boot windows, it will still run and let you do anything you want as long as that doesn't require internet.

 

[JayNor]

I suppose this also means we should expect an Arrow Lake-HX refresh for laptops. Makes sense if the Nova Lake laptop updates are on an end of 2026 schedule.

 

[thestryker]

I suppose this also means we should expect an Arrow Lake-HX refresh for laptops.

ARL is a low margin part (compared to Intel's normal) so I'm not sure the scope of their N3 wafer buys. ARL HX also didn't really start shipping until Q2 which compresses the timelines. Assuming NVL is actually a universal step forward it doesn't really make sense that they would be launching HX late (unless this is low volume for Intel). So the alternative would launch ARL HX refresh sooner which would crunch the current ARL HX so that doesn't really make a lot of sense either.

 

[emv]

You are confusing notions here....
Even if A.I. is the main reason for windows 12 it doesn't mean that it will force you to have NPU, it just won't do any of the A.I. stuff.

Look how much of windows 10-11 depends on the internet, power down your router and boot windows, it will still run and let you do anything you want as long as that doesn't require internet.

All AI applications run on a "non-AI" computer. They may be slower.... but not a lot. There are tests on this

"Expect slightly higher clock speeds thanks to better silicon binning and refinements on the Intel 20A process, which introduced RibbonFET and PowerVia in Arrow Lake’s initial release." - I think AI hallucinations wrote this article.

 

[bit_user]

"Expect slightly higher clock speeds thanks to better silicon binning and refinements on the Intel 20A process, which introduced RibbonFET and PowerVia in Arrow Lake’s initial release." - I think AI hallucinations wrote this article.

Oh wow, I didn't catch that part!

@Paul Alcorn , you might want to tell Hassam that Intel's 20A node got cancelled.

 

[thestryker]

Well this rumor survived a lot time before a contradiction happened:

This is what I expected when I put together my ARL system, but still a bit disappointing to see that nothing is likely changing.