Intel today launched sales of the new generation of desktop processors Core Ultra 200S, also known as Arrow Lake-S. The new products have not become faster than their predecessors, which Intel itself admits, but they have significantly reduced power consumption. The chips received completely new computing cores, integrated graphics of a new generation, as well as an AI engine.
New processors are equipped with 14 to 24 processing cores and do not support multithreading. At the moment, only models with unlocked manual overclocking multiplier are available, and they have a rated power consumption (TDP) of 125 W. These chips are aimed at gamers and overclocking enthusiasts.
The new performance Lion Cove cores received a 9 percent increase in IPC (instructions executed per clock) compared to the performance Raptor Cove cores in the 14th generation Core processors. In turn, Skymont’s efficient cores saw a 32% increase in IPC for integer operations and up to 72% for floating point operations compared to Gracemont.
The flagship model of the Arrow Lake-S series is the Core Ultra 9 285K processor. The chip includes eight productive Lion Cove cores and 16 energy-efficient Skymont cores. It can automatically overclock to 5.7GHz. The processor includes four graphics cores based on Xe-LPG architecture. Interestingly, Intel did not present a version of the Core Ultra 9 285KF without integrated graphics.
The Core Ultra 7 265K and Core Ultra 7 265KF processors each received 20 cores (eight high-performance and 12 energy-efficient) and a maximum frequency of up to 5.5 GHz. Finally, the 14-core Core Ultra 5 245K and Core Ultra 5 245KF each offer six high-performance and eight energy-efficient cores, and their frequency reaches 5.2 GHz.
Intel Core Ultra 200S became the first desktop processors with Intel Xe graphics cores based on the Xe-LPG architecture. Each iGPU chip has four graphics cores. Declared support for DirectX 12 Ultimate and Intel XeSS scaling. You shouldn’t expect miracles from the built-in graphics in games, but for working with multimedia it will be quite effective: AV1, AVC, HEVC and others codecs are supported.
All Core Ultra 200S processors have a built-in AI engine or NPU with performance of 13 TOPS (trillion operations per second) when working with INT8 floating point numbers. This is 3.7 times less than the NPU performance of Lunar Lake mobile processors.
Along with the new processors, new motherboards with the LGA 1851 processor socket and the Intel Z890 chipset are also being released. They will bring support for DDR5-6400 memory, four more PCIe 5.0 lanes and a number of other improvements.
The flagship Core Ultra 9 285K is priced by the manufacturer at $589. The Core Ultra 7 265K model will cost $394, while the Core Ultra 7 265KF without integrated graphics will cost $379. Finally, the junior Core Ultra 5 245K is offered for $309, and its version without integrated graphics costs $294.