Intel Announces Intel Core Ultra 200S Series Desktop Processors

Intel has officially announced its new Intel Core Ultra 200S Series processors. Launching October 24, the new Intel Arrow Lake CPU lineup includes five new processors at launch, giving customers a range of options for the next generation.

The prices of the Intel Core Ultra 200S Series processors range from $294 for the low-end Core Ultra 5 245KF up to $589 for the high-end Ultra 9 285K.

According to Intel, the Core Ultra 200S series has more than two times the graphical performance and over 10% more multithread performance while using less power.

“The overarching goal of this program was to make dramatic improvements in energy efficiency,” Robert Hallock, VP of client computing group and GM of AI technical marketing, said.

The Arrow Lake CPUs, according to Intel, cuts power consumption in general productivity by up to 58% in some instances compared to the last-generation Raptor Lake. That power consumption drop still comes with a slight increase in overall performance.

For gaming, Arrow Lake sees drops of up to 165W in total system power compared to last gen. Games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and F1 24 both saw drops over 50W. Assassin’s Creed Mirage had a near 80W power drop. Along with the power drop comes cooler performance.

Using the Core Ultra 9 285K as the benchmark, Intel said that temperatures fell while gaming by as much as 17°C.

For general gaming performance, the new CPUs run mostly on par with the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X. A few games like Total War: Warhammer 3 and Age of Mythology Retold perform better on the Core Ultra 200S. However, games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Red Dead Redemption 2, per Intel itself, seem to perform slightly worse.

It’s not just for gaming, either. When comparing against the 9950X, the Core Ultra 285K showed improvement in various rendering processes almost across the board. According to Intel’s data, it lagged behind slighting in CPU-only rendering in Blender, photo edition, Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe Lightroom Classic.

With this new CPU generation, Intel is introducing its new 800 Series chipset. This new chipset comes with 48x PCIe lanes and 20x PCIe 5.0 lates. It has integrated support for Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3, and Thunderbolt 4. Discretely, it supports Wi-Fi 7, Thunderbolt 5, and Bluetooth 5.4. There is also support for Thunderbolt Share that allows quick file sharing along with PC to PC screen sharing and even storage sharing.

Three of the launch SKUs will also have integrated graphics. The Core Ultra 9 285K, Ultra 7 265K, and Ultra 5 245K all feature 4 GPU cores. The 285K and 265K will have a 2 GHz max frequency while the 245K has a 1.9 GHz max frequency.

Regarding memory, the Intel Core Ultra 200S Series supports up to DDR5-6400 MT/s with a max capacity of up to 192GB at a max of 48GB per DIMM.

AI is the buzzword with PCs right now, and the Intel Core Ultra 200S series seems to be no different. The new family of processors is being touted as Intel’s “first ever AI PC for enthusiasts” thanks to its first-ever integrated NPU for AI.

The new Arrow Lake family of CPUs, Intel says, features up to 36 platform TOPS (Tera Operations per Second) thanks to its NPU delivering up to 13 TOPS on its own. The NPU will allow larger-scale tasks to be performed parallel with one another, including generating video effects, audio, and even gaming. An example Intel used in its briefing on the AI abilities of the new processors was NPU-enabled auto framing and background segmentation. Intel says offloading tasks to the NPU will “free up the GPU to focus on delivering higher game frame rates.” They add that offloading various tasks can “win back up to 15%” of frame rates in games.

To add more ways to utilize the NPU, Intel says its working with over 100 ISVs (independent software vendors) to bring over 300 AI-based features to users. They also say that there are more than 500 different AI models supported, including object detection, language processing, instance segmentation, and more.

In terms of overall performance, Intel says that the Core Ultra 200S processors have up to 50% faster AI performance than AMD. Specifically, the 50% increase was using Scene Edit Detection in After Effects. Most improvements were between 15%-20%, however.

In addition to the Core Ultra 200S series, Intel did confirm that details on its next-gen Core Ultra H and HX Series processors for mobile will be coming in the first quarter of 2025. More details on those will come at a later date.

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