Last week, reports emerged that Intel's Lunar Lake had been delayed. Now Intel is refuting the claims, saying that the new mobile chip is on schedule. Meanwhile, Intel's next desktop CPU, Arrow Lake, will reportedly be released in October. Could Arrow Lake really outperform Lunar Lake?

According to Digitimes (via Benchlife), the chip giant said that "Intel's next client processor (codenamed Lunar Lake) has not been delayed. As disclosed earlier, Lunar Lake-based systems will begin shipping in Q3 for the holiday season."

So is Lunar Lake delayed or not?" Part of the confusion may have to do with the distinction between shipping the chip itself and the availability of a fully built device (in this case a typical laptop) with Lunar Lake.

It is clear that Intel will begin shipping Lunar Lake chips to laptop manufacturers some time before the final devices hit store shelves or are sent to end users. Furthermore, when Intel announced Lunar Lake at the recent Computex show, it did not disclose the full brand name or list of SKUs.

AMD did that for their new Strix Point chip for notebooks, and also announced that notebooks with Strix Point will be available starting in July. Roughly, it was clear that Lunar Lake would be launched after Strix Point, even if the exact date was not clear.

But Intel's ambiguity also played a part in all this. For starters, Intel's statement that "systems will begin shipping in Q3" leaves little leeway. The third quarter runs through the end of September. But "shipping systems" is not the same as actually being available at retail.

Moreover, Intel's statement also says "for the holiday season." In other words, Intel claims that laptops with the chip will begin shipping from manufacturers by the end of September, with retail availability targeted for late November.

In reality, it is not that simple. The holiday season runs from late November through January, so that's a pretty wide window; a November release would be a good description of "for the holiday season." Strictly speaking, however, a December or even early January launch would be within the holiday season, and Intel could claim to have achieved its self-proclaimed goal.

And one has to assume that Intel's choice of "holiday season" was intended to give it a little leeway, rather than a more definitive statement, say, in October or November.

In other words, it is hard to really say whether Lunar Lake is actually delayed as a result of Intel's ambiguity. On the one hand, the nature of the Lunar Lake announcement at Computex made it clear that Lunar Lake was not imminent.

On the other, if one cannot buy a Lunar Lake laptop until December, January, or even later, it will be increasingly difficult to accept that everything is going as originally planned. In fact, Lunar Lake generally feels like a temporary bump forward in Intel's roadmap to provide chips that qualify for Microsoft's new "Copilot+" definition of an AI PC.

So how does Lunar Lake's desktop sibling, Arrow Lake, fit into all of this? Benchlife reports that "K-series processors and Z890 chip motherboards for the Arrow Lake-S desktop processors are For non-K-series processors and B860 and H810 chip motherboards, we will have to wait until CES.

It is unclear what the source of this information is. However, if it is true, the October launch could mean that Arrow Lake desktops will be available before Lunar Lake laptops. was barely mentioned and few details were revealed.

The bottom line is that Intel's plans for both Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake remain thoroughly unclear. Our hunch is that Arrow Lake will be released too early in October, most likely at the end of the year, slightly ahead of Lunar Lake.

However, these dates could be different, with Intel launching one or two notebooks through select brands like Asus in 2024, with full-scale mass production beginning in early 2025, and similarly Arrow Lake becoming widely available as a 2025 product. It would not be surprising if they may actually shift a bit. In any case, we'll know soon enough. Worth noting.