That means your next Intel CPU upgrade could be available for the holiday season.

This means that Christmas could be a warzone as we are also expecting new AMD Zen 5 CPUs to arrive around that time, bringing us a complete overhaul of the CPU market over the course of perhaps just a few weeks.

Intel made these declarations as a preview to its Tech Tour event that’s coincidentally happening at the same time as the launch of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X laptop CPU announcement. Lunar Lake is a direct rival to Qualcomm’s Arm-based laptop CPU chip, with Intel declaring it the most power-efficient x86 CPU chip yet.

Qualcomm aims to break into the Windows laptop market by creating a chip that can convert x86 instructions on the fly to work on its Arm chip architecture. With Arm processors being power-efficient, Qualcomm X and other competing technologies present a significant challenge to AMD and Intel in the mobile PC space.

But back to more conventional desktop gaming PCs, the more significant upgrades that most of us will be looking to make will be to choose between AMD Zen 5 or Intel Arrow Lake, with both architectures expected to be announced at the Computex trade show in a couple of weeks.

As such, your best bets for a gaming CPU upgrade for the time being remain the AMD Ryzen 7 7800 X3D or the Intel Core i5 14600K, depending on how much you want to spend or if you’re buying a brand new system (AMD) or have an older Intel motherboard that you can upgrade.