Intel unveils Core Ultra 200U, a new incarnation of Meteor Lake for budget laptops

Intel today introduced low-power Core Ultra 200U processors for thin and light notebooks for the mainstream market at CES 2025. Unlike the Core Ultra 200V released last year, the new products do not have a powerful AI engine, so they will not be able to appear in Copilot+PC class computers.

Image source: Intel

Core Ultra 200U are updated models of Core Ultra 100, since the new products are built on cores with the same architecture: Redwood Cove for productive P-cores and Crestmont for energy-efficient E-cores.

However, the Intel Core Ultra 200U series chips are based on the Intel 3 process technology, while their predecessors used Intel 4. The transition to a thinner process technology has improved the overall performance of the processors. Intel Core Ultra 200U chips also feature an increased NPU clock speed, as well as support for Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4.

In total, Intel introduced four Core Ultra 200U models, and each of them has 12 cores – two P-cores, eight E-cores and two low-power LP-E cores. The processors differ in frequencies: the older Core Ultra 7 265U accelerates to 5.3 GHz, while the younger Core Ultra 5 225U can only boast 4.9 GHz. The base and maximum TDP values ​​are set at 15 W and 57 W respectively.

The Intel Arrow Lake-U platform supports up to two PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs, two Thunderbolt 4.0 ports, Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4. Memory support is limited to 96GB DDR5-6400 or 64GB LPDDR5X-8400. Laptops with Arrow Lake-U chips will be announced soon and should hit store shelves in the coming weeks.