Intel Arrow Lake processors mark a significant step forward for the major chip manufacturer which has been in the news quite often of late. The new Intel Core Ultra 200S series processors are the first to include silicon made from TSMC on the package, however, this is isn’t the first time that Intel is using TSMC made silicon. TSMC has been making chipsets for Intel motherboards for ages and with the Arrow Lake launch, that relationship has only gotten stronger. So what does that mean for the consumer? Better performance? More power-efficiency? Let’s find out.
Intel recently unveiled their latest mobile processors in the form of Core Ultra Series 2 a.k.a. Lunar Lake boasting of several new improvements especially on the AI acceleration front along with all new CPU cores and several efficiency gains with regards to power consumption and thermals. Arrow Lake borrows a lot of things from Lunar Lake including the two new core architectures – Lion Cove for the P-Core (Performance Cores) and Skymont for the E-Core (Efficiency Cores). The P-Cores also get a larger L2 Cache and the E-Cores get access to the L3 Cache. The NPU (Neural Processing Unit) isn’t as powerful as Lunar Lake with just 13 TOPS compared to the 48 TOPS that Lunar Lake’s NPU4 is capable of. This is the first ever NPU on an Intel Desktop processor and there are plenty of other avenues for AI acceleration on desktop systems so more of the real estate on the CPU package can be dedicated to CPU compute rather than AI acceleration. In Intel’s terms, this would be 2x Gen3 NPU cores. The mobile chips get the newer Gen4 NPU Cores. The iGPU (Integrated Graphics Processing Unit) is also new with about 320 Execution Units. Aside from these improvements, there’s integrated Thunderbolt 4 and Wi-Fi 6E support. Though it must be pointed out that most top-tier motherboards have already integrated the newer Wi-Fi 7 standard onto their motherboards.
The new Intel Core Ultra 200S processors are expected to reduce power consumption across a wide assortment of workloads and even provide higher multi-threaded performance over Raptor Lake-R processors in some workloads. One of the major changes to the physical design is that the Arrow Lake processors are the first to have a disaggregated design which is a different way of saying that they use a chiplet design much like what AMD does with their Ryzen processors. However, the interconnect technologies that AMD and Intel use are quite different so it’s not exactly the same. That being said, a disaggregated structure allows Intel to pick tiles with different performance metrics across different SKUs. There’s a lot more to dig through on the architecture front but we’ll stick to the review for the Core Ultra 9 285K for today.
We’ve already reported on the launch of the Intel Core Ultra 200S series with this first wave of processors having just five SKUs but they’re all heavy hitters. At the top of the stack is the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K which has 8 P-Cores and 16 E-Cores for a total of 24 Threads. Notice something? There’s no multi-threading! Intel has done away with HyperThreading and has introduced cores that just do one thread each. What this entails for heavily-threaded applications will be seen shortly. The flagship 285K is followed by the Ultra 7 265K and 265KF and then we have the Ultra 5 245K and 245KF. The Ultra 5 245K comes with 6 P-Cores and 8 E-Cores.
| SKU | P-Cores | E-Cores | Threads | GPU Cores | NPU TOPS | Price (USD) |
| Intel Core Ultra 9 285K | 8 | 16 | 24 | 4 | 13 | 589 |
| Intel Core Ultra 7 265K | 8 | 12 | 20 | 4 | 13 | 394 |
| Intel Core Ultra 7 265KF | 8 | 12 | 20 | NA | 13 | 379 |
| Intel Core Ultra 5 245K | 6 | 8 | 14 | 4 | 13 | 309 |
| Intel Core Ultra 7 245KF | 6 | 8 | 14 | NA | 13 | 294 |
The Intel Xe-LPG iGPU on these processors sport 4 GPU Cores and the NPU can do 13 TOPS as we’d mentioned previously. The Intel Core Ultra 9 285K has 36 MB of L3 Cache on the compute tile which can be accessed by all the cores. Moreover, unlike previous designs where the E-Cores would be on one side of the silicon and P-Cores would be on the other, the Arrow Lake-S processors now have them placed in a sandwiched manner. So the P-Cores and E-Core clusters are interleaved.
The E-Cores come with a base clock of 3.2 GHz and go up to 4.6 GHz whereas the P-Cores start off at 3.7 GHz and have a Turbo boost of 5.5 GHz, a Turbo Boost Max of 5.6 GHz and a Thermal Velocity Boost going up to 5.7 GHz. If you’ve gone through the 14900K marketing then you’d have the 6 GHz number mentioned several times across their literature. That has now dropped with this new generation of processors. The iGPU with its 4 Xe Cores totals up to 64 Execution Units and they start off at 300 MHz and go all the way to 2 GHz on the 285K and 265K while the 245K gets about 1.9 GHz of boost.
As for memory support, the Arrow Lake processors can handle CUDIMM (Clocked Unbuffered DIMM) as well as CSODIMM (Clocked SODIMM). These are the new memory technologies that have a clock signal source on the memory sticks themselves compared to previous memory technology which relied on the CPU for the clock signal. Officially, the Intel Core Ultra 200S processors can handle up to DDR5-6400 CUDIMM and up to DDR5-5600 UDIMM.
As for the platform, we get a new 800 series chipset based motherboard with the first wave only featuring the Z890 chipset with other variants coming later in the launch cycle.
We received a fully decked out kit with the new CUDIMMs in the form of Kingston Renegade DDR5 memory modules that can go up to 8400 MT/s, an ASUS ROG MAXIMUS Z890 HERO motherboard and the new ASUS ROG RYUJIN III 360 ARGB all-in-one liquid coolers. Here’s the full specs:
With the Intel Core Ultra 200S series, Intel has managed to bag a few wins over its predecessor, the Intel Core 14th Gen Processors. However, there are a few losses as well. With productivity tasks, Intel has managed to retain its crown and we even saw some anomalous spikes in some benchmarks putting the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K and the Ultra 5 245K way ahead of everyone else. The support for much faster memory has certainly helped the performance especially considering that the power consumption isn’t at high at the 14th Gen processors. In Blender, Adobe Photoshop and V-Ray, we saw the 285K going toe-to-toe with the 9950X from the competition and it even beat the 9950X in video editing workloads. However, when it comes to gaming, the Ultra 9 285K did end up taking a few hits. This is the first generation of processors from Intel with quite a few new technologies and as a result there will always be some teething issues that we might, hopefully, see resolved in the coming months. Overall, the new Intel Core Ultra 200S processors look like they’re here to stay and we’re certainly excited to see what Intel follows this up with.
