CES 2026 showcased Intel's latest laptop processor offering, the Core Ultra Series 3. Laptops with this processor are reportedly set to arrive in select markets by the end of this month.
Meanwhile, Intel will also be launching an updated offering to their Arrow Lake processor series called Intel Arrow Lake Refresh, which consists of desktop and laptop-class processors.
Last week, we reported that details about one of these processors, the Intel Core Ultra 9 290HX, had leaked onto the web, and now the Intel Core Ultra 9 290K desktop-class processor has also been seen to have leaked onto the web.
The desktop processor chip features 24 physical cores with 8 Performance cores and 16 Efficiency cores, similar to what is shown on the laptop model. It comes with a base clock speed of 3.7GHz and a Turbo Clock speed of 5.8GHz.
In terms of benchmark scores, it scored 3456 for the single-core score and as high as 24,610 for the multi-core benchmarks. This score shows that the Arrow Lake Refresh chip comes with a 9 percent higher performance compared to the previous Arrow Lake processor.
So far, there is no information announced by Intel on when this series of processors will be offered, but Golden Pig Upgrade says that it will arrive in certain markets as early as March or April of this year.
The benchmark tests that are being conducted now seem to confirm this to some extent, although Intel did not make any announcements about it at the CES 2026 event. Perhaps this is because they want to focus on the Intel Core Ultra 300 series offerings, and the Arrow Lake Refresh chips are more for those who want to update their existing desktop computers, although they also offer new laptop processors.
