Intel Announces Core Ultra 200S Arrow Lake CPUs

As part of a busy day in the CPU world, Intel has lifted the embargo on the Core Ultra 200S "Arrow Lake" desktop processors. This isn't the review embargo but just an overview on this new generation succeeding 14th Gen "Raptor Lake Refresh" on the desktop.

A big focus for Arrow Lake is on optimizing performance-per-Watt compared to the power hungry Raptor Lake (Refresh) parts while still delivering nice gains in multi-threaded workloads and being competitive in gaming. With the Core Ultra 200S series is the first time an NPU is being added to desktop CPUs. In the case of the NPU and integrated graphics for Arrow Lake, they are akin to what's found in Meteor Lake and not the recently launched Lunar Lake.

Intel talked up Arrow Lake as being able to deliver the same performance of Raptor Lake Refresh at half the power consumption. While there is no Hyper Threading (HT / SMT) support, with 24 cores Intel is promoting Arrow Lake as being faster than the Core i9 14900K 32-thread processor.

Intel is promoting Arrow Lake's Skymont E cores as 32% IPC uplift over Gracemont while the Lion Cove P cores see a 9% IPC uplift over Raptor Cove. But when getting to the (Windows) gaming benchmarks for many games there is little to no improvement except for much lower CPU power uage.

The Intel Xe graphics with Arrow Lake should be sufficient for basic desktop use, media encoding, and related work. With Arrow Lake's Xe Graphics being very similar to Meteor Lake, the Linux driver support should be in good shape for launch. The necessary device IDs have been upstreamed for a while.

Likewise, the NPU support for Arrow Lake should be in good upstream shape with the iVPU accelerator driver.

Being announced today are the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K, Core Ultra 7 265K, Core Ultra 7 265KF, Core Ultra 5 245K, and Core Ultra 5 245KF processors. The flagship Core Ultra 9 285K has 24 cores/threads via 8 P cores and 16 E cores while clocking up to 5.7GHz.

During the briefings in advance of today's announcement, Intel was going very heavy on talking up the power efficiency improvements with the Core Ultra 200S series.

Of course, all the benchmark results shown by Intel were under Microsoft Windows 11... You'll need to wait for the Phoronix review of Arrow Lake to see how well the new Core Ultra desktop processors perform under your favorite operating system.

Note that ECC support is advertised but the initial consumer desktop motherboards aren't expected to support ECC memory modules. This will presumably be for later Xeon/professional SKUs with workstation motherboards.

Sales of the Core Ultra 200S series is set to begin on 24 October. The flagship Core Ultra 9 285K will launch at $589 USD. That's the brief overview for now. Of course, what we are interested in is the Linux performance and power efficiency, so stay tuned for the review(s) on Phoronix.