Did Intel’s whole next-gen chip lineup and launch date just leak? It looks that way – but there’s bad news for some fans of Team Blue

A new leak has seemingly outlined the entire first wave of Intel’s hotly-anticipated Core Ultra 200 CPUs, also known as Arrow Lake-S. The leaked information around the forthcoming line of CPUs comes complete with core counts and boost frequencies.

The leak originates from Chinese tech website Benchlife, which also claimed that its sources have suggested an Ultra 200 release date of October 10 – if true, this would align with previous rumors about a Q3 2024 launch for the second generation of Intel’s rebooted CPU lineup. Of course, this is all based on rumor, so take everything in this article with at least four or five grains of salt.

The listed chips are all desktop models, though there’s no official confirmation yet as to whether any of them will be sold as standalone chips like last year’s Intel Core i9-14900K. Last year’s model is still the most recent Intel CPU you can buy for custom-built PCs. With Intel still apparently dead-set on abandoning its iconic ‘i’ branding, it’ll be interesting to see whether any of these new chips will be available for purchase outside of pre-built systems.

Something’s missing here

Despite previous rumors claiming its existence, there’s one chip notably missing from this lineup: an Intel Core Ultra 3 processor, which was purported by leakers (as covered by VideoCardz) to bring 8-core budget goodness to the Core Ultra lineup. Currently sitting at the bottom of this rumored stack is the Core Ultra 5 225, a 10-core chip that looks to be a straight upgrade from the Core Ultra 5 115.

Regardless of whether these chips will be available for standalone purchase – and I personally hope at least some of them will be, but I won’t be surprised if that isn’t the case – it’s disheartening to see a distinct lack of Ultra 3 chips in this initial lineup. While the Core Ultra 100 lineup did offer some reasonably wallet-friendly laptop chips at its lower end, fans of Team Blue with limited funds have been left out in the cold for too long.

Although there apparently is a single Core Ultra 3 105UL chip already out in the wild according to Intel’s own datasite, I wasn’t able to find any actual products available for purchase that use it.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, the new flagship chip does look mighty impressive. With eight hyperthreaded performance cores, sixteen efficiency cores, and a TDP of 125W (a hungry boy, then), the Core Ultra 9 285K promises to be a powerhouse – and while we don’t yet have details on the cache memory or thermal performance thresholds, we do know that the next-gen Core Ultra 9 chips will boast an exciting new feature called ‘Thermal Velocity Boost’.

Once you discount the F, K, KF, and T variants, this is actually only five new chips. (Image credit: Benchlife)

While I do think Thermal Velocity Boost’ is a fairly silly name (almost on par with men’s razor blade nomenclature), ‘TVB’ promises to push clock speeds higher in Intel’s top-tier processors, with the Core Ultra 285K reportedly offering a zippy maximum boost clock of 5.7GHz.

It’s entirely possible (although I really hope this isn’t the case) that Intel might actually be planning to get out of the discrete CPU market altogether, only offering embedded and mobile versions of its Core Ultra chips going forward. If that happens, I’m going to be upset – and not just because it’ll mess up how we maintain our best processor ranking.

After all, Intel’s rising competitors in the processor market (Apple and Qualcomm) don’t offer standalone CPUs for PC builders, and as SoC-integrated graphics get better and better, it’s likely there’s more money to be made from the laptop market. Whatever happens, one part of this leak I do hope proves accurate is the October launch date; mark your calendars, folks.