Intel quietly opens preorders on new Arrow Lake CPUs

By Monica J. White Published December 30, 2024

With CES 2025 right around the corner, most of us expect the big announcements to arrive in a week — but some companies are already teasing new products. In Intel’s case, the manufacturer plans to add more CPUs that might compete against some of the best processors. To that end, Intel has now announced preorders for new Arrow Lake CPUs, but most of us can’t get our hands on them yet.

As spotted by VideoCardz, Intel China announced that preorders for the Core Ultra 200 non-K CPUs are opening today, with availability planned for January 13. These CPUs will presumably just be non-overclockable versions of existing Arrow Lake chips, such as the Core Ultra 9 285K. In its announcement, Intel teases “new architecture” and “better power consumption.”

This is a curious announcement, and unexpected, too. The preorders seem to only be open in the Chinese market right now — Intel’s global accounts are staying silent on the matter. The question now is whether these Core Ultra 200 non-K processors will hit the global market at the same time, on January 13, or perhaps the launch will be reserved for China for a little while. It’s hard to say, but if they are slated to appear internationally, then this is a quiet launch indeed. Intel is likely to talk more about these new CPUs during CES 2025 next week.

Another interesting Intel CPU launch, also reported on by VideoCardz, appears to be taking place in China and Korea first. This one is a leak and it’s not coming from an official Intel account, so take it with some skepticism.

According to Golden Pig Upgrade Pack on Weibo, the Arrow Lake-H series, which is a lineup of laptop CPUs based on Lion Cove and Skymont architectures, will first arrive in China and South Korea. Other regions are said to follow a month later. These will be mainstream chips that will often be paired with Nvidia’s next-gen RTX 50-series graphics cards. However, gamers would be more interested in the Arrow Lake HX-series, which wasn’t mentioned this time around.

This leaves us with two signs of Intel CPUs potentially launching in China before hitting the global market. We’ll undoubtedly learn more during CES 2025.