Up until now, most talk has been of the Intel Arrow Lake processor launch being right at the tail end of 2024. However, popular CPU spec-listing app, CPU-Z, has just been updated with support listed for the upcoming CPUs, possibly hinting at sooner arrival.
Arrow Lake is the direct followup to the just-launched Meteor Lake range that is currently appearing in hundreds of new gaming laptops, thin and light laptops, and other mobile devices, including the MSI Claw gaming handheld. However, Meteor Lake hasn’t seen a release on desktop. Instead, it’s the Intel 14th gen Raptor Lake chips that launched last year that desktop gamers have been stuck with. Arrow Lake, though, will be used across both desktop and mobile when it arrives.
The CPU-Z update, then, brings the software’s version number up to 2.09 and brings with it a changelog that lists “improved support” for Intel 14th Meteor Lake mobile CPUs. More intriguingly, though, the software also lists “preliminary support” for the Arrow Lake desktop processor family.
What that preliminary support amounts to is likely that the developers have speculated on how the chips will communicate their status and added those flags to the program. However, it’s also possible that they’ve somehow got hold of very early hardware or documentation from an Intel source in order to correctly add the processor support.
What’s more, other upcoming chips have been added in this update, with AMD’s Hawk Point and Hawk Point 2 (Zen 4/Zen 4c) chips also listed as getting preliminary support in the update.
The full changelog is as follows:
- Improved support of Intel Meteor Lake and preliminary support of Arrow Lake.
- AMD Hawk Point and Hawk Point 2 (Zen 4/Zen 4c).
- NVIDIA RTX 4070 SUPER (AD104-350).
- The benchmark can now be ran on a single coreset/cluster.
What do you make of this Intel Arrow Lake and AMD Hawk Point support? Could we see either sooner than previously expected? Let us know your thoughts on the PCGamesN Facebook and X pages. Meanwhile, check this link to find out more about Arrow Lake or head on over to our best CPU for gaming guide for the latest top choices of CPU.