Intel is finally addressing how hot and power-hungry its desktop CPUs have become. Intel's new flagship Core Ultra 200S processor series, launching October 24, focuses on performance per watt to run cooler and more efficiently than previous 14th-generation chips. Codenamed Arrow Lake S, these are also Intel's first enthusiast desktop CPUs with an integrated NPU, or neural processing unit, to accelerate AI tasks.
“Arrow Lake will deliver Intel’s best performance for desktop and mobile enthusiasts,” said Josh Newman, general manager and VP of product marketing, client computing. “It will deliver this performance with significantly lower power consumption than previous generations of Intel enthusiast products, and Arrow Lake also delivers the first Intel enthusiast AI PC in both desktop and mobile performance.”
At the heart of the Arrow Lake architecture is Intel's major effort to reduce the power consumption of its chips. Both the 13th and 14th generation Intel Core CPUs were power hungry, often consuming far more power than their AMD equivalents. These new Core Ultra 200S series chips cut power consumption in half when running basic desktop tasks, and Intel claims they'll save lots of watts when gaming, too.
“The desktop will see about half of the power consumption,” says Robert Hallock, vice president of the Client Computing Group at Intel. “If you only use a single core, you'll also see about half the performance. When gaming it will be higher or lower, 50 to 150 watts just depends on the title and its behavior.”
During a recent press conference, Intel demonstrated Assassin's Creed Mirage runs on its flagship Core Ultra 9 285K compared to its current Core i9-14900K. The Ultra 9 285K delivered similar or better performance at 80 watts less Mirageand Intel says it will reduce performance by up to 58 watts in games like… Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, F1 24And Total War: Pharaoh. There are some extreme cases like Warhammer: Space Marines 2 The Ultra 9 285K even runs at 165 watts less than the 14900K.
Intel also claims that the Core Ultra 9 285K's case temperatures will drop by around 13°C compared to 14900K when gaming at 1080p with a 360mm all-in-one cooler. While Intel moves to its new LGA 1851 socket with these new chips, existing all-in-one coolers should work fine. You may need to speak to your cooler manufacturer to see if you need additional spacers, but Corsair has confirmed this The edge that all its coolers that supported LGA-1700 also support LGA-1851.
Intel uses its latest 3D packaging technology to build the Core Ultra 200S series chips, and the package size has been reduced by 33 percent compared to the 14th generation chips. This new package brings some interesting changes. The flagship Ultra 9 285K ships with 24 cores, 24 threads and a boost clock of 5.7 GHz. That's a slower boost clock and eight fewer threads than the previous 14900K, as Intel removed hyperthreading here in favor of energy efficiency. “We knew we could save the wattage on hyperthreading by not including it,” says Hallock.
The Ultra 9 285K will have eight performance cores (P-cores) and 16 efficiency cores (E-cores). The E cores have been upgraded to process instructions more efficiently and there is even a reduction in latency. There will be 36MB L3 Shared Smart Cache, 3MB L2 per P-Core (up from 2MB on the 14th generation), and 4MB L2 per E-Core. Intel says the Ultra 9 285K will be around 8 percent faster in single-threaded tasks and around 15 percent faster in multi-threaded workloads compared to the 14900K.
Intel has also provided some limited benchmarks for gaming with the Ultra 9 285K compared to AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X and Ryzen 9 7950X3D processors. It looks like Intel's latest flagship will be going toe-to-toe with AMD's flagship Zen 5 desktop CPU, but when it comes to X3D, Intel's own data suggests it will be behind. Intel is also surprisingly transparent about the fact that it is behind the currently best gaming CPU, AMD's Ryzen 7 7800X3D.
“I think we'll be about five percent behind compared to X3D parts, which is really good for us considering we only have the cache built into the CPU and the great IPC of the product” says Hallock. “You’re going to see a deficit of about five percent, and I want to make that clear.”
That's disappointing for the gaming space, but Intel claims it will continue to hold the performance crown for most developer and AI tasks. An NPU has even been added to the Ultra 9 285K that can speed up certain AI tasks. It is only capable of 13 TOPS, meaning these processors are not eligible for Microsoft's Copilot Plus features, which require an NPU of 40 TOPS or better. Intel hopes that as NPU adoption increases, developers can use this to offload tasks and even for some gaming-related features.
“It was certainly possible to put a 40 TOPS NPU in this product, but that would require reducing the core count or changing the GPU core count,” admits Hallock. “You start to compromise on fundamental performance dimensions that enthusiasts really care about. That didn't feel like the right mix. We also talked at length about the enthusiast market’s attitude to AI overall, and I think it’s fair to say it’s fairly cautious.”
A new LGA 1851 socket also means new motherboards. To use the Core Ultra 200S desktop CPUs, you need a new Z890 board. Intel's 800 series chipset supports up to 24 PCIe 4.0 lanes, up to 8x SATA 3.0 and up to 32 USB 3.2 ports. The platform supports a total of 48 PCIe lanes, with up to 20 of them being Gen 5 from the CPU. The CPU also has Wi-Fi 6E and 1GbE, Bluetooth 5.3 and 2x Thunderbolt 4 integrated, with motherboard manufacturers able to add discrete options for Wi-Fi 7, up to 4x Thunderbolt 5 ports, 2.5GbE and Bluetooth 5.4.
Intel is also improving memory support with the Core Ultra 200S series and Z890 motherboards, supporting up to DDR5-6400, up to 48GB per DIMM, and up to 192GB maximum capacity. DDR4 support for the 800 series chipset has been discontinued. These chips are also Secure Core compatible and have three built-in hardware engines for security.
However, it is not clear how long the LGA 1851 socket will last. AMD has committed to supporting AM5 through 2027 or beyond, but Intel has declined to comment on future product plans. With rumors that an Arrow Lake S refresh is being scrapped in favor of a move to Nova Lake, it's possible that the LGA 1851 socket won't be available for much longer. Intel launched its LGA-1200 socket in 2020 before replacing it with the LGA-1700 a year later, so hopefully history doesn't repeat itself again.
The Arrow Lake revelation comes just days after Intel said the nightmare of the Raptor Lake crash was finally over. Instability issues with 13th and 14th generation chips have now been resolved, with a high voltage issue being the cause. Intel's new Arrow Lake chips will not be affected by the Raptor Lake voltage issues.
Intel's new Core Ultra 200S chips begin shipping October 24, with the flagship Core Ultra 9 285K priced at $589, a Core Ultra 7 265K priced at $394, and the Core Ultra 5 245K priced at $309. Dollar. Intel is also releasing KF variants of the Ultra 7 265KF ($379) and Ultra 5 245KF ($294) without an integrated GPU.