Intel Core Ultra 200S Desktop CPUs Unveiled: Arrow Lake Promises Big Efficiency Gains

Arrow Lake's Thread Director And Power Management

An updated Intel Thread Director from Lunar Lake also comes to Arrow Lake. We've hinted at it before, but the company really wants to keep the E-cores as busy as possible and only wake the P-cores when necessary. In Raptor Lake, less-demanding work could be offloaded from a P-core to an E-core. Meteor Lake took steps towards keeping the E-cores busier but directing work to them first.

However, Meteor Lake's processing resources were split across the SoC and Compute tiles. This allowed more granular power management, but resulted in an extra hop as work traversed the core hierarchy. That work would have to migrate from E-cores on the SoC tile to E-cores on the Compute tile, before making its way to the P-Cores.


With Arrow Lake, like Lunar Lake before it, that juggling has changed considerably. That's just a lot of logic to manage, and now all the cores are on the Compute tile. Of course that's a huge change from Intel's 14th Gen Core processors, which were still just a big monolithic chip design. The prominent difference now is that, rather than being relegated to background tasks, the cores are fast enough to be the first target for a new load. 

Because of that big change in target workload, Intel's Thread Director scheduler has undergone some major changes as well. Rather than just wait for E-cores to cry for mercy (IPC feedback), a new hardware-based prediction engine can better classify workloads as to whether they should go to the E-cores or if they absolutely have to go to P-cores instead. 


We can see in this example, where a load starts on an E-core but then quickly has to move to P-cores because a sustained load was keeping the cores busy. That's exactly where the big cores need to step in and Thread Director does that pretty seamlessly. 

All told, Intel says that Arrow Lake will see up to a 58% reduction in power consumption in lightly-threaded tasks. Specifically, that's the top-end Core Ultra 9 285K compared to the previous champ, the Core i9-14900K in a Zoom meeting. It might not make a huge difference on an entire house's power bill, but if the newest GPUs like the GeForce RTX 5090 are coming to suck down that extra electricity, any relief is welcome. 

Gimme The Chips: All Intel Core Ultra 200S CPUs Detailed

Of course, we know why you're here. It's time to drool over hardware like I did as a kid in the 80s, but instead of a Sears Holiday Catalog, we have a slide deck. Well here they are in all their splendor. 


As with the previous generations, the CPUs are divided into numbered lines: Core Ultra 9, Ultra 7, and Ultra 5, and each tier has a different configuration in terms of the number of CPU cores of both P- and C- variants. The Core Ultra 9 285K sits atop the mountain with eight P-cores and 16 E-cores for a total of 24 hardware threads. Remember, Hyper Threading is no more. This CPU tops out at 5.7 GHz, which is down a tick from the 6.2 GHz of the Core i9-14900KS. Still, with architectural improvements we expect the Core Ultra 9 285K to beat out the prior-gen champ at just about every turn. 

As has been customary, Intel provides a couple of different model types. The CPUs that end with K are the top of each range. These chips have functional GPU tiles as well. Meanwhile, the models that end in KF have no GPU cores available. As we'll see in a moment, these chips will be a little cheaper than the K models but it's not that much of a break. The GPU is a relatively pokey original Xe graphics design with just four cores, but Intel expects enthusiasts would rather have a discrete GPU anyway. 


The bang-for-the-buck option may just go to the Core Ultra 7 265K and KF. These CPUs lose four E-cores but retain the octet of P-cores. They also top out at a slightly lower 5.5 GHz. Meanwhile, the Core Ultra 5 245K loses two P-cores and four more E-cores for a total of 14 threads. It also tops out at a slightly lower 5.2 GHz. 

The NPU Comes To The Desktop With Arrow Lake

While not all of these processors have a GPU, all of them have a neural processing unit (NPU). These units excel at the low-precision math found in most machine learning models, and can accelerate things like LLMs, image generation, or (more likely, in this case) lightweight video and audio processing. Similar to the Meteor Lake NPU, this unit has a TOPS rating (trillions of operations per second) of 13. That should still be sufficient for tasks like live translation/transcripts or video background blurring in applications that can use it like Microsoft Teams or Windows Studio effects. 


If you think back to Lunar Lake Core Ultra 200-series CPUs, though, these NPUs look kind of wimpy. 13 TOPS compared to the mobile version's 48 TOPS. Now, the mere presence of an NPU in the Core Ultra series represents a first for desktop CPUs. Both Intel and AMD have shipped NPUs, but only in notebook SKUs. Still, it's there to handle relatively light AI loads that don't need to be offloaded to something other CPU and GPU engines, freeing up resources for better concurrency. 


The reality, of course, is that desktops (and HX-based notebooks, for that matter) have another AI processor that's so much faster than anything a thin-and-light notebook has on tap: a discrete GPU. Of course, NVIDIA is a monster in the AI space because its GPU chips are just so darned good at the math AI requires. And AMD is no slouch in the AI department; RDNA3 GPUs have tons of memory, which is great for machine learning, and have their own AI accelerators baked into them. It stands to reason that a lot of AI acceleration just isn't necessary like it is in the thin-and-light notebook market. 


From a pricing standpoint, the Core Ultra 200S processors aren't that different than the previous generation. The Core Ultra 285K should be the same $589 that the Core i9-14900K launched at. The Core Ultra 7 265K drops the price by 33% down to right below $400. Thanks to its relative similarity to the top-end model, that is definitely a value target. The Core Ultra 5 245K and KF are the same $300 as the previous generation, but with a rather steep dip in thread counts. We're not sure that represents a great deal, but testing will ultimately determine that. 

Intel Core Ultra 9 285K Arrow Lake Performance Claims Impress

In addition to the enormous reduction in power consumption compared to the 14th gen, Intel says the new Core Ultra 9 285K is faster, too. The geometric mean of Intel's internal benchmarks showed a 15% improvement over the Core i9-14900K. And Intel says it's also got a 13% faster geometric mean compared to the Ryzen 9 9950X, which has 16 Zen 5 cores and 32 threads via SMT. 


Those increases are relatively modest numbers, but in reality, this story sounds an awful lot like AMD's 9000-series desktop CPUs based on the Zen 5 architecture. Those CPUs used less power and were still moderately faster than the prior generation, but a lot of enthusiasts raked AMD over the coals because of it.

Recall that Intel's last generation of CPUs eventually had failure issues until a series of recent microcode updates, while some of AMD's chips came with an odd 65 W TDP as well. AMD decided to boost performance of some of those chips with a higher default TDP in an AGESA update. Based on Intel's internal benchmarks at least, it looks like AMD's Ryzen 9000 series might need all the performance it can get in the future.


If that's not enough, Intel says the performance of Core Ultra 9 285K will match that of the Core i9-14900K but at half the power. By Intel's measures, it also leads over AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X by a considerable margin. 

In the end, these are first-party performance claims and the real proof will be delivered once we get some quality Core Ultra 200S hands-on time. And we'll get access to these exciting new desktop chips soon enough, as sales and preorders start two weeks from today, on October 24. Keep tuned to HotHardware for our own independent benchmarks, as we'll be lighting-up Arrow Lake soon on our test benches, as we're eager to see where these new chips fall.