Intel CFO admits it fumbled with its Core Ultra Arrow Lake CPUs

Intel admits “we didn’t have a good offering this year” with Arrow Lake

At the Deutsche Bank 2025 Technology Conference, Intel made a rare admission of defeat. Intel CFO, David Zinsner, stated that “we kind of fumbled the football on the desktop side,” referring to the company’s Arrow Lake desktop CPUs. This admission was first spotted by WCCFtech.

Intel’s Arrow Lake desktop CPUs didn’t deliver major performance gains over their predecessors. In many workloads, primarily gaming, they often performed worse than their last-generation counterpart. This allowed AMD to take the lead in the desktop CPU market, especially amongst gamers. While Intel’s Arrow Lake CPUs are more power-efficient than Intel’s last-gen desktop CPUs, they didn’t deliver the performance buyers expected.

Next year, Intel expects its next-generation Nova Lake CPUs to deliver a “more complete set of SKUs” and “improve our position next year.” In fact, the CFO said that they “feel pretty good about client.” Hopefully, that means that the desktop CPU market will be more competitive in 2026.

As you know, we kind of fumbled the football on the desktop side, particularly high performance desktop side. So we’re as you kind of look at share on a dollar basis versus a unit basis, we don’t perform as well and it’s mostly because of this high end desktop business that we didn’t have a good offering this year. But Nova Lake, which is the next product, is a more complete set of SKUs.

It does address the high end desktop market. And so we would expect that we will improve our position next year. So all in all, I actually feel pretty good about the client. It’s not executing flawlessly, but it’s executing pretty well.

David Zinsner – Intel CFO (Deutsche Bank 2025 Technology Conference)

Intel fumbled with Arrow Lake, but they expect things to change in 2026 with the release of Nova Lake. If recent rumours are to be believed, Intel will deliver much higher core counts next year with Nova Lake. Additionally, Intel’s leaked “BLLC” (Big Last Level Cache) tech should give Intel’s next-gen CPUs better performance in PC gaming workloads.

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