Intel has shared some details of its upcoming new CPUs, revealing that it believes its Arrow Lake desktop gaming CPUs are “on track” to arrive in the last quarter of this year and that its Lunar Lake mobile chips will be arriving even sooner, in Q3 2024. That means your next Intel CPU upgrade could be available well in time for the holiday season.
The reveal of these new Intel CPU timelines means we can expect the battle for the best gaming CPU to really hot up in a few months. That’s especially true, as we are also expecting new AMD Zen 5 CPUs to be arriving around that time, bringing us a complete overhaul of the CPU market over the course of perhaps just a few weeks.
Intel made these declarations as a preview to its Tech Tour event that’s just so coincidentally happening at the same time as the launch of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X laptop CPU announcement. Lunar Lake is a direct rival to Qualcomm’s Arm-based laptop CPU chip, with Intel declaring it the most power-efficient x86 CPU chip yet.
For those unfamiliar, x86 is the set of instructions that all desktop PC AMD and Intel CPUs have used for decades. Meanwhile, the Arm architecture used by Qualcomm uses a different instruction set that isn’t natively supported by the standard versions of Windows or most PC games. There is an Arm version of Windows 11, but it’s not widely supported.
However, just as Apple has achieved with its Arm-based CPUs, Qualcomm is looking to break into the Windows laptop market by creating a chip that can convert x86 instructions on the fly to work on its Arm chip architecture. With Arm processors famously being incredibly power-efficient, Qualcomm X and other competing technologies present a significant challenge to the likes of AMD and Intel in the mobile PC space.
But back to more conventional desktop gaming PCs, the more significant upgrades that most of us will be looking to make will be to choose between either AMD Zen 5 or Intel Arrow Lake, with both architectures expected to be announced at the Computex trade show in a couple of weeks.
What today’s announcement seemingly confirms, though, is that while we can expect a reveal at Computex, it won’t be a hard launch with products immediately available. Instead, we’ll have to wait another few months before the products to be available to buy.
As such, your best bets for a gaming CPU upgrade for the time being remain the AMD Ryzen 7 7800 X3D or the Intel Core i5 14600K, depending on whether you’re buying a brand new system (AMD), or have an older Intel motherboard that you can upgrade to the latest Intel silicon.