Along with the Core Ultra 200HX processors, Intel today introduced new mobile Core Ultra 200H (Arrow Lake-H) processors designed for mainstream gaming laptops. The new products are based on the same Arrow Lake architecture, but have several distinctive features.
Image source: Intel
Like the Core Ultra 200HX, the Core Ultra 200H models use a tile (chiplet) structure. However, the tiles themselves are different. For example, the Core Ultra 200H compute chiplet contains significantly fewer cores than the Core Ultra 200HX. It has up to six high-performance Lion Cove P-cores and up to eight energy-efficient E-cores, which share 24 MB of L3 cache memory via an internal ring bus (Ringbus). In the press release, Intel does not specify which energy-efficient cores are used in the Core Ultra 200H series processors – the new generation Skymont or the old generation Crestmont, which are also used in Meteor Lake-H chips.
The SoC chiplet of the Core Ultra 200H processors is equipped with an AI accelerator (NPU) with a performance of 13 TOPS (trillion operations per second). This does not allow them to be classified as a Copilot Plus PC platform. Probably, in this way the company wants to promote the new mobile processors of the Core Ultra 200V (Lunar Lake) series, designed for thin and premium laptops, to this role. Intel also introduced several additional models of these chips (including vPro versions for the enterprise notebook segment), equipped with an AI accelerator with 45 TOPS performance.
SoC and I/O chiplets of Arrow Lake-H processors have fewer supported interfaces. For example, they do not support PCIe 5.0 lanes, which are equipped with the Core Ultra 200HX. However, the key benefit of Arrow Lake-H is its larger integrated graphics chiplet.
The iGPU in the Core Ultra 200H is built on the Xe-LPG architecture (as in Meteor Lake), and not on the Xe2 architecture (Battlemage in Lunar Lake). If in Arrow Lake-HX the integrated graphics on the Xe-LPG architecture contains only four Xe cores, which lack matrix XMX engines for hardware support for ray tracing (it is available only through DP4a), then Arrow Lake-H received eight Xe cores, each which are equipped with XMX engines (as in discrete Intel Arc A-series video cards).
The main increase in AI performance for the Core Ultra 200H is provided by integrated graphics – the figure varies from 63 to 77 TOPS. However, Windows 11 does not use the hardware capabilities of integrated graphics to accelerate AI. The benefit of this will only be noticeable in third-party applications that use the capabilities of XMX engines. The Core Ultra 200H series is headed by the 16-core Core Ultra 9 285H model with a 6P+8E+2LP core configuration. The new high-performance P-cores operate at frequencies up to 5.4 GHz. The chip received eight Xe graphics cores.
The Core Ultra 7 265H and Core Ultra 7 255H models feature the same compute chiplets and integrated graphics, but operate at lower frequencies. The Core Ultra 7 265H is accelerated to 5.3 GHz, and the Core Ultra 7 255H is accelerated to 5.1 GHz on P-cores. The Core Ultra 7 235H model received 14 cores with a 4P+8E+2LP configuration. For P-cores, a frequency of up to 5.0 GHz is declared. The integrated graphics contains eight Xe cores. The youngest model in the series, Core Ultra 5 225H, has the same configuration of computing cores. The P-core frequency is 4.9 GHz, but it is equipped with only seven Xe graphics cores.
Intel says the single-threaded, multi-threaded and graphics performance of the Core Ultra 200H processors is more than 15% faster than Meteor Lake-H.