Intel has officially announced the Core Ultra 200S series desktop processors globally, bringing the new power-saving architecture to the masses while maintaining fairly competitive raw performance metrics.
After getting the mobile market’s Lunar Lake processors from TSMC, Team Blue is back for round two by giving them Arrow Lake orders but that doesn’t seem to be a bad choice after all, since the Core Ultra 200S family is gunning for the power efficiency game rather than its old ways of “performance no matter what” mentality.
As a result, users will see drastically reduced power consumption across everyday applications of up to 58% in terms of package power metric while for gaming, up to 165W of reduced wattage can be observed.
Intel also gave a sample reference – The multi-threaded performance offered by the Core i9-14900K can be achieved with only half of the power through the Core Ultra 9 285K.
Despite the series are made for desktop platforms, they also come with an iGPU component packing 4x Xe2-LPG cores as well as an NPU with 13 TOPS of performance. But more often than not, users will have a discreet GPU, and power budget isn’t an issue so they are better off running AI applications with their NVIDIA/AMD cards anyway.
But if said applications support it, one can run AI-related functions with the NPU therefore freeing up more resources for the GPU for smoother frame rates and whatnot but only time will tell if this works in a practical sense.
Here’s a quick rundown of the 5 models scheduled for the initial debut.
|
Model |
Cores / Max Boost Clock | GPU Cores | NPU Performance |
Price |
|
Core Ultra 9 285K |
8P+16E / 5.7GHz | 4 | 13 TOPS | US$589 |
| Core Ultra 7 685K | 8P+12E / 5.5GHz |
4 |
US$394 |
|
|
Core Ultra 7 265KF |
8P+12E / 5.5GHz | N/A | US$379 | |
| Core Ultra 5 245K | 6P+8E / 5.2GHz |
4 |
US$309 |
|
|
Core Ultra 5 245KF |
6P+8E / 5.2GHz |
N/A |
US$294 |
By pairing one of the chips with the new 800 series chipset, users will have access to more PCIe 4.0 lanes in addition to PCIe 5.0, SATA 3.0 ports, USB 3.2 ports, faster XMP profiles, CUDIMM DDR5 RAM support of up to 192GB in total, as well as updated Intel Extreme Tuning Utility with 1-click OC enhancements across multiple aspects.
Apparently, Intel also buffed up security through the Silicon Security Engine that provides data authentication and confidentiality as well code integrity on a hardware level which can co-exist with AI workloads so that any private data source used for it are covered equally as any standard data.
Beginning October 24, OEM partners will start shipping systems packed with Intel Core Ultra 200S processors while standalone retail units will be sold via DIY PC shops across the world.
