As we’re getting our bags packed to head out to the airport later today to venture to Las Vegas, whatever Intel is up to is a bit of a mystery. We’ve got their keynote on our calendar for Monday, January 5th at 3pm PST, but unlike most keynotes, they’re not providing any information to the press ahead of time. I suppose, if they are, they don’t consider us to be important press at that.
In the interim, we can absolutely speculate about what’s coming soon, to which I suspect an Arrow Lake refresh is due in the form of an Intel Panther Lake Core Ultra 3 processors. What’s remarkable here is that these chipperies are a bit late based on how Intel has been launching processors over the past few years – we usually see the tick or tock for the top 3-4 “K” series processors appear around the start of Q4 and then CES becomes the launching pad for the other dozen lower wattage/non-K skus for the generation.
To further back up the Core Ultra 3 hypothesis, we see the invite to the press conference that we’re planning on attending to address the subject of how awesome the Core Ultra 3 Series just so happens to be. Now, we’ve also heard there will be a reception afterwards with complementary beverages, so we’ll be all ears to hear what they have to say to make it through to the beverages portion of the event (Ed: Don’t have too much fun, you’ve got Pepcom to attend after, and they usually have superior beverage selections!).
We’ve also been awaiting the launch of the B770 GPU, should it ever happen to exist. The rumor mill suggests that it could be a launch at CES, but we’re rating this as a long-shot. The Core Ultra 4 Series rumors are also looking promising, but we don’t expect any word on those until Q4 of 2026 based on Intel’s typical CPU release schedule.
We’ll follow up with what we learn, but with GIGABYTE holding an event with an open bar starting at 10AM PT, we may just end up staggering through the rest of Monday.