Intel has announced Arrow Lake desktop processors in the Core Ultra 200K series, also known as Core Ultra 200S. The company promises up to 15% higher performance with a significant reduction in power consumption
The first wave of desktop Arrow Lake-S consists of unlocked chips with a nominal TDP of 125W. These are processors for enthusiasts and gamers. The fastest Core Ultra 9 285K has 24 cores (8 productive Lion Cove and 16 efficient Skymont cores) and a clock speed of 5.7 GHz. It is equipped with a 4-core Xe graphics processor. The Core Ultra 7 265K chip has 20 cores (8 + 12) and acceleration up to 5.5 GHz. Core Ultra 5 245 offers 6 productive and 8 efficient cores with a frequency of up to 5.2 GHz. The 265KF and 245KF models do not have integrated Xe graphics. All Arrow Lake-S processors feature a 13 TOPS NPU — 3.7 times slower than the neurochip in Lunar Lake laptops.
Lion Cove (performance) cores have 18 execution ports and up to 36 MB of L3 cache. They are expected to deliver up to 9% higher IPC (instructions per clock cycle) performance than the Raptor Cove in the 14th Generation Core series. The Skymont efficiency core has double the L2 cache bandwidth and 4MB of L2 cache compared to the previous core. It delivers 32% faster IPC for integer operations and up to +72% faster for floating point operations compared to Gracemont.
Intel Arrow Lake-S is the first desktop platform to feature the Xe-LP graphics architecture. The processors offer up to 4 Xe cores and up to 4 ray tracing units. The built-in graphics card provides 8 TOPS for AI operations. It supports DirectX 12 Ultimate, but you should not expect acceptable performance in demanding games. The GPU contains the Xe Media Engine and supports AV1, AVC, HEVC, etc. encoding. there is also support for DP4a instruction and XeSS scaling.
Intel emphasizes low power consumption. According to internal tests, the 285K processor requires up to 58% less power for productive tasks compared to Raptor Lake-R chips. For gaming, the claimed difference is -73 W compared to 14900 K when using the base profile. Lower power consumption means lower temperatures — Intel claims that the new processors are on average 13°C cooler than their predecessors.
Intel has also introduced the top-of-the-line Z890 chipset for premium motherboards with a new LGA-1851 socket that is only compatible with Core Ultra 200. The most important update is the support for 20 lanes of PCIe 5.0 — next-generation PCIe 5.0 graphics will no longer be limited to 8 lanes when used in conjunction with 5.0 M.2 SSDs.
Given that AnandTech website no longer worksdetailed reviews of the processors can be found on Tom`s Hardware and TechPowerUp. The first five Core Ultra 200K models cost from $249 to $589. The new processors require new motherboards, which adds at least $200 to the cost of the platform. The processors will go on sale on October 24.
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