Intel’s new processors are coming, but does the company deserve our trust?

So, as expected, Intel announced its latest line of processors for desktop PCs, arguably the most significant one released in the last five years: the Core Ultra 200S (codenamed Arrow Lake). These follow the company’s first such line for laptop PCs (codenamed Lunar Lake), featuring a new architecture, increased performance, serious improvements in power efficiency as well as an NPU — for the first time on desktop — all for pretty much the same prices their predecessors launched at. They will be available to purchase on October 24th in five different variants, two of which do not feature an iGPU (KF models), starting from less than $300 to almost $600.

This 15th line of Intel processors is, in theory, designed to address most of the issues present in Intel’s 13th and 14th line of desktop chips. They are faster in almost any task, even if not by much, they consume considerably less power — so they should also run cooler, although we’ll have to wait for the first independent reviews for that — and they offer support for more PCI lanes for advanced peripherals such as next-gen graphics cards or storage. Intel, just like with the Lunar Lake line of chips, dropped support for hyper-threading on the Arrow Lake line, insisting that this does not negatively affect performance. Again — as is wise to do more and more often lately — we’ll have to wait for independent testing to confirm such claims.

Although performance and efficiency improvements are always welcome, the new Core Ultra 200S line disappoints on several fronts. Intel itself, for instance, openly admits that these chips will not outclass or even match AMD’s current equivalent processors, let alone new ones, when it comes to gaming (but PC gamers remain one of the most important target groups for hi-end CPUs). The iGPU block (the integrated graphics processor of the non-KF models) is not substantially improved over the one offered by previous Intel processor lines and the NPU is not powerful enough to support Microsoft’s Copilot Plus features.

Most importantly, the Core Ultra 200S line of processors depends on a new chipset (the 800-series) and socket (LGA1851), so it requires a new motherboard (as well as DDR5 memory for consumers still using DDR4 kits). Problem is, Intel refuses to commit to the LGA1851 socket long-term and several hardware experts believe that this particular one could end up being a single-generation socket (so hardly worth investing in). Others believe that the usual “We do not comment on future products” answer Intel is going for when asked about this does not necessarily indicate anything of the sort — but it would sure have been nice to put the minds of consumers at ease on the matter.

The biggest problem Intel is currently facing, though, has nothing to do with hardware specs or CPU socket support. It has everything to do with trust. After the well-documented, exhaustively-covered PR disaster that happened because of the instability issues of its 13th-gen and 14th-gen processors (codenamed Raptor Lake), consumers just don’t know whether it’s a good idea to invest their money on a new Intel processor or even platform again. It’s fair to say that Intel is asking for a lot of faith with Arrow Lake, despite having handled a lot of things wrong in the Raptor Lake case over the past year.

There’s really no point going through the whole timeline of what happened with Intel’s 13th-gen and 14th-gen chips. The fact of the matter, though, is that there were many reports of this serious hardware issue since the beginning of the year, the company did almost nothing about it publicly for more than 4 months, repeatedly tried to downplay the whole thing and was forced to acknowledge it at the end of July. Even then, there was a lot of mixed messaging and confusion before Intel finally started issuing microcode updates and working with motherboard manufacturers towards a true solution.

In other words, it was not just the seriousness of the Raptor Lake instability issues and the problems they were/are causing — it was also the way Intel handled all this that makes it really hard to just take the company’s word on anything nowadays. Intel claimed a few days ago, for instance, that — after those microcode and motherboard BIOS updates went out over the course of several months — the issues have now been “fixed”. But, to this day, we still don’t know which chip batches were affected by these issues, how many CPUs are permanently damaged and in need of replacement or if there’s ever going to be a software tool people can use to determine that for the CPUs they own. Is this what a “resolved” situation looks like? Probably not.

One can now see why many consumers would not risk buying another Intel CPU anytime soon or maybe ever again — or, at the very least, not until that CPU has been around for a while, without problems reported, so they can deem it safe to do so. As a result, what Intel would like for these new chips to accomplish — to help it make a comeback after a rough couple of years — is out of its hands really. Whether the company deserves to have a chance at redemption or not is something only consumers will decide this time around — and, for that, Intel may have needed something quite a bit better than the Core Ultra 200S line.