Intel has just launched its Core Ultra 200S processors – the new generation for desktop PCs – and the company has informed us that laptop chips for this Arrow Lake family aren’t far away.
In fact, the Arrow Lake notebook CPUs will arrive in Q1 2025, in next-gen laptops, specifically with Core Ultra 200H and Core Ultra 200HX flavors, which are mainstream and enthusiast (very powerful) processors respectively.
These models will sit alongside Lunar Lake laptop (Core Ultra 200V) chips which have recently been sprung on the market (impressing a good many folks for one reason or another).
Core Ultra 200H chips will top out at 14-cores, with the flagship sporting 6 performance cores and 8 efficiency cores. As for Core Ultra 200HX, that will run up to 24-cores with 8 performance cores and 16 efficiency cores.
Expect to see new laptops packing Arrow Lake CPUs at CES 2025 (where we might also get Nvidia’s next-gen notebook GPUs, and other mobile goodies besides).
Analysis: Clearing up any CPU confusion
Confused about how Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake laptop silicon fits together, and what’s different? Let’s outline the main differences between the two, and indeed between the H and HX takes on Arrow Lake.
Lunar Lake majors in power-efficiency and is designed for thin-and-light premium laptops, whereas Arrow Lake will offer more in the way of performance and raw grunt, particularly with those top-end HX CPUs. (Although Arrow Lake is still very efficient compared to Raptor Lake Refresh, of course, as we heard all about at the desktop launch yesterday).
That said, on the AI side, things are a bit different. Lunar Lake features a much more powerful NPU with 40+ TOPS – so it qualifies as a CPU that can be the engine of a Copilot+ laptop – but Arrow Lake has an NPU that can only muster 13 TOPS (a measure of AI performance).
However, the total AI performance from the Core Ultra 200H family will be seriously beefy, as the integrated GPU offers 77 TOPS, plus 9 TOPS from the processor – all of these components join the NPU in dealing with AI workloads – giving a total of 99 TOPS. The HX series chips, however, have a GPU that only offers 8 TOPS, plus 15 for the CPU, for a total of 36 TOPS for these processors.
So, the Core Ultra 200H chips have a considerably more powerful integrated GPU (running with up to 8 Xe Cores, as opposed to 4 Xe Cores with the HX series) and XeSS support is in the mix. With 24-cores and relatively fast clock speeds, though, the Core Ultra 200HX will be formidable chips for the best gaming laptops (and the likes of workstations). These are basically the notebook equivalents of the freshly revealed desktop Core Ultra 200S chips – except these mobile CPUs come in a more compact package (a third smaller, in fact).
The idea is that HX processors will be paired with a heavyweight discrete GPU in gaming laptops, where integrated performance isn’t going to cut it. (Although we’re slowly moving towards a world where that statement is increasingly less true, it must be said – though a separate GPU is always going to be more powerful, of course).
Via Wccftech