Even after performance fixes and price cuts, Intel’s CEO admits that it ‘fumbled the football’ with Arrow Lake CPUs but claims that Nova Lake will fix everything

2025-09-01 06:58:00
www.pcgamer.com

Despite receiving numerous updates and enhancements since its rough launch in October 2024, Intel’s Arrow Lake desktop CPUs have not been especially popular, and for multiple reasons. At a recent technology conference, the chip company openly admitted that it had “kind of fumbled the football … particularly [the] high performance desktop side”, but also promised that “Nova Lake is a more complete set of SKUs.”

These specific comments were said by Dave Zinsner, Intel’s Chief Financial Officer, in an interview at the 2025 Deutsche Bank’s 2025 Technology Conference (via Wccftech). In addition to discussing developments in its financials and manufacturing, Zinsner was also asked about Intel’s current CPU product line, specifically what was working well and what needed improvement.

Opening with its mobile products, Zinsner was upbeat: “I think on notebook, we’re in pretty good shape. We introduced Lunar Lake this year. It’s in the process of gaining adoption. We’re expecting this quarter to be a pretty good quarter for Lunar Lake. So notebook, I think is good, solid, share is solid.”

I can only assume that Intel’s CFO made a slip of the tongue because Lunar Lake, a potential little chip exclusively for low-powered platforms, was actually launched in May 2024, though the first processors didn’t start rolling out until September. Core 200V chips are indeed fine chips—suitable for slim laptops and handheld gaming PCs—but I’m not convinced that the product is gaining as much adoption as Intel would like, as the embedded DRAM makes them more expensive than the competition.

However, Zinsner was a lot more frank about Arrow Lake, its multi-tiled processor for desktop PCs. “As you know, we kind of fumbled the football on the desktop side, particularly high performance desktop side. So we’re as you kind of look at share on a dollar basis versus a unit basis, we don’t perform as well and it’s mostly because of this high end desktop business that we didn’t have a good offering this year.”

A close-up, detailed photo of a delidded Intel Core Ultra 200S processor, codenamed Arrow Lake, showing the structures of each tile comprising the processor.

Intel Arrow Lake: Complex, expensive, disappointing. (Image credit: Fritzchen Fritz)

What he’s referring to is the fact that the Core Ultra 9 285K just isn’t good enough when compared to what AMD has on offer. For pure gaming, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D isn’t just faster, it’s also a lot cheaper. It’s a similar situation for productivity and content creation, as the Ryzen 9 9950X is roughly on par with the 285K but undercuts it on price.

It doesn’t help that the Arrow Lake SKU range is rather poor, with the Core Ultra 5 245K being very underwhelming, and there has been no direct replacement for the Core i3, so far. Only the Core Ultra 7 265K is truly worth considering, as it’s not that much slower than the 285K and it’s wildly cheaper.

While Zinsner didn’t offer any explanation for the ‘football fumbling’, he did go on to say that what Intel has planned next will make things all hunky-dory again, albeit rather uncommittedly so.

“Nova Lake, which is the next product, is a more complete set of SKUs. It does address the high end desktop market. And so we would expect that we will improve our position next year. So all in all, I actually feel pretty good about the client.”

Nova Lake will be another multi-tiled processor, and over the past few months, we’ve seen all kinds of rumours about enormous P-core and E-core configurations and cache enhancements to go up against AMD’s 3D V-Cache. Just as with Arrow Lake, most of the tiles will be manufactured by TSMC, though the main compute tile is expected to be straight from Intel’s own foundries.

A delidded AMD Ryzen 9000 series processor held in a hand, showing the two CCD and one IOD chiplets

Faster, cheaper, better. Intel has a lot to do to beat Zen 5, let alone Zen 6. (Image credit: AMD)

The biggest problem that Nova Lake has to face, though, is that not only does it need to address the performance and price deficit between Arrow Lake and AMD’s Zen 5, but it will also need to address the likelihood that Zen 6 will be around at the same time. In other words, the next generation of Core Ultra processors will need to be significantly better than the current series, if Intel is to claw back ground lost to the Ryzen 9000-series.

Naturally, the chief financial officer of any large company is never going to be downbeat about future products, and I expect every senior leader to talk up Nova Lake at every opportunity. However, Intel has far more on the line than just desktop market share. It’s been steadily losing market share to AMD in the world of servers for several years, and it’s all but given up in the AI sector, as it doesn’t have anything to combat AMD and Nvidia’s massive superchips.

Even if Nova Lake turns out to be extremely good, so much so that Arrow Lake is instantly forgotten and PC gamers around the world abandon Ryzen X3D chips in favour of the new Team Blue chips, the big money lies in sectors other than desktop computing. And cold, hard cash is something that Intel desperately needs right now to pay for its never-ending foundry losses.

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