Intel just admitted it "fumbled the football" on its Arrow Lake gaming CPUs

Intel's chief financial officer, David Zinsner, has made a rare confession, admitting that Intel "kind of fumbled the football on the desktop side," when referring to the company's current Arrow Lake gaming CPUs at the Deutsche Bank 2025 Technology Conference. The admission comes as AMD swallows Intel's desktop CPU market share at an alarming rate, but Zinsner says he's confident that forthcoming Intel Nova Lake CPUs will address this situation.

AMD is currently giving Intel a hard time on our best gaming CPU guide, where we currently don't recommend any of Intel's new Arrow Lake CPUs. In the benchmarks for my Core Ultra 7 265K review, I found a chip that did a good job of addressing the high temperatures and power draw of Intel's previous Raptor Lake chips, but which struggled to keep up with Intel's older CPUs, let alone the latest AMD CPUs with 3D V-cache, in games, and in some cases the performance drop-off was huge. My recent tests of the same chip in our Alienware Aurora R16 review show that AMD's X3D chips still have the edge here as well.

"As you know, we kind of fumbled the football on the desktop side, particularly [the] high-performance desktop side," said Zinsner, quoted in a report by CRN. "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," he says.

It looks as though Intel may have learned its lesson, though. "Nova Lake, which is the next product, is a more complete set of SKUs," says Zinsner. "It does address the high-end desktop market, and so we would expect that we will improve our position next year."

Several leaks have recently appeared about Intel Nova Lake CPUs, including a shipping manifest showing a 28-core Intel CPU, as well as rumors pointing to some of the chips coming with an Intel 3D V-cache equivalent to take on AMD's X3D chips. In fact, some rumors even suggest that there's one Intel CPU with 3x the L3 cache of the 9800X3D.

Intel already knew it was onto a loser before with its current Core Ultra 200 chips when it comes to games, and it admitted to the press that they would be slower than new X3D CPUs in the build-up to the launch. Can Intel pull it back with Nova Lake? We'll have to wait and see.

In the meantime, if you're thinking of upgrading your CPU, check out our full guide to buying the best gaming motherboard, as well as our best CPU cooler guide, so you can give your chip the best home possible.