We weren't particularly impressed with Intel's Arrow Lake desktop CPUs upon their release earlier this year. While chips like the Core Ultra 9 285K and Core Ultra 5 245K are far from sluggish, we clocked them as slower in games overall than some of the comparable chips from the older Raptor Lake generation, and nowhere near as good value in relative terms compared with their AMD competition.
Nonetheless, new data from Mercury Research shows that, despite the frosty reaction towards these chips from the PC hardware community at large, it doesn't appear to have made as much of a dent in Intel's desktop market share as you might expect. MR reports that Intel's slice of the desktop CPU market is 4.9% lower in the third quarter of this year, compared to Q3 2025.
