We’ve known for a while now, that Intel’s early-2026 refresh of its Core Ultra series-2 “Arrow Lake” desktop processor lineup could see a refresh with the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus and Core Ultra 7 270K Plus, with reviews tentatively going live on March 23. VideoCardz reports that the company could unveil these chips close to two weeks earlier than that, on March 11. This would probably be when the company announces the two chips and reveals some of their specs. Reviews could remain on track for March 23, with retail availability of the chips shortly after. There’s no confirmation yet on whether the two chips have “KF” variants lacking integrated graphics, but that’s fairly likely.
Both SKUs see increases in CPU core counts and L3 cache sizes compared to current SKUs leading the Core Ultra 5 and Core Ultra 7 brand extensions. The Core Ultra 5 250K Plus is a 6P+12E chip, with a generous 30 MB of shared L3 cache; while the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus maxes out the “Arrow Lake-S” silicon, enabling all 8 P-cores, and all 16 E-cores, with all 36 MB of shared L3 cache available; albeit with slightly lower clock-speeds than the flagship Core Ultra 9 285K. Intel dropped plans to launch the fabled “Core Ultra 9 290K Plus,” which would have been a supercharged variant of the 285K with even higher clock speeds.
