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Intel Core Ultra 200S desktop processors deliver "one of the largest reductions in power Intel has seen for quite some time" but may fall short in some games of 14900K.

Arrow Lake is a major change for Intel. One of the biggest changes we've seen for a long time. The next generation of desktop and mobile processors are expected to deliver "significantly less power levels" than the previous generation - up to 30% - and in doing so, gaming performance could be slowed down completely.

The desktop chips will be branded with the Intel Core Ultra 200S, also known by the name Arrow Lake S. They will be available from October 24. I've listed the specifications in a table with all the names below, but you should look for the Ultra 9 285, Ultra 7 265, or Ultra 5 245.

Intel's Arrow Lake is a major shake-up because it is effectively betting on its mobile platforms working well on desktops. Arrow Lake shares many similarities with the latest Core Ultra 200V series, including sharing Lion Cove, Skymont, and Skymont architectures. However, it's closely related to first-generation Core Ultra 'Meteor Lake' in many other aspects.

Core Ultra 2S specifications

Arrow Lake is Intel's first tiled processor. AMD has been using desktop chiplets for quite some time.

Arrow Lake's construction is still quite novel. Intel uses its Foveros chip packaging technology to load a 'base' tile with various chipsets. This includes a GPU tile as well as a SOC tile.

Lunar Lake and Meteor Lake both take a similar approach. Lunar Lake uses fewer chips than Arrow and Meteor.

Intel has already announced that it will not be using its own 20A node in Arrow Lake. Instead, Intel will pay TSMC a handsome fee to use its fabnodes. This is not a good sign for Intel but it's a good thing for us gamers. Lunar Lake seems to have benefited greatly from using TSMC nodes for its most important chips.

Arrow Lake, as you can see from the table above, offers up to 16 E-cores (Lion Cove architecture) and eight P-cores (Lion Cove architecture). Lunar Lake has already shown both core designs to be very effective in terms of single-thread performance and multithreaded performance, despite its lack threads. But how will this translate in the big leagues.

Intel claims that the Lion Cove P cores are 9% faster than Raptor Cove, the core architecture of the current 14th Gen chip.

Greg Boots, platform manager at Intel, said that Lion Cove is about "high performance with lower power."

Skymont's new Skymont cores for the E-cores will provide an additional 32% IPC when performing integer operations or up to 72% IPC when performing floating point operations. This is not the usual way that IPC is split, as integer and floating point performance can vary a lot depending on the type of work being done by the CPU. However, both offer significant gains.

Arrow Lake's success will be largely determined by the E-core performance, more so than in previous generations. Intel has removed Hyper-Threading, which allows each core to be split into two threads.

Intel is taking a risk by ditching Hyper-Threading. It reduces the number threads that are available from the P cores for multithreaded tasks, which is increasing. We've seen this with Lunar Lake, where it can have a significant impact on multithreaded scores, even when those E-cores are working harder than ever. Newer engines like UE5 are allowing games to better utilize threads. Intel does not expect this to be a major issue.

I can see how it's not a problem. At least on the high-end. Core Ultra 9 285K has 24 threads in total, even without Hyper-Threading. This is the same number of threads as on the Ryzen 9 9900X. The Core Ultra 5 has fewer threads. Next year, we'll probably see more affordable chips and thread counts may even be lower.

Intel told me that the new and improved E cores would be responsible for multithreaded performance at a Lunar Lake launch event in September.

Greg Boots said: "The E cores are real cores," and they don't require the help of Hyper-Threading.

We'll have to wait and see how this works out in the testing phase, but speaking with Damien Triolet from Intel, he was confident that games could benefit from the simplicity provided by one thread per core. In some cases, splitting cores into multiple threads has caused a slight performance hit in gaming.

The new 800-series chipsets have 24 PCIe-4.0 slots and 20 PCIe-5.0 lanes. This is 48 PCIe lanes total.

Arrow Lake S offers native Wi-Fi 6E as well as Bluetooth 5.3.

Intel has confirmed Arrow Lake will not suffer from the unstable issue that plagued the 14th Gen. It also has a smaller package by 33% which should make it less bendable. To be honest, I'd love to see the end of bent CPUs, washer installations and other issues. This is a great time for Intel to tackle these problems.

Core Ultra 200S performance

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Intel says it wants to "maintain performance" between the 14th Gen and new 200S Series. Intel claims that Raptor Lake will have the same performance as 200S Series in the slides they sent me in advance, but depending on which game you play, there may be some performance regression.

In F1 24 the Ultra 9 285K is 7% behind the Core i914900K. In Red Dead Redemption 2 4%. Far Cry 6 is down 13%. is up as much as 13% on F1 23.

Intel's view of the competition is similar. The 285K is anywhere between 28% faster and 13% slower than the Ryzen 9 9950X (with APO enabled).

Overall, the raw performance of the 285K is not very impressive.

Core Ultra Power Efficiency

Intel's main claim for Arrow Lake is that power efficiency is more important than performance. Intel claims that Arrow Lake can deliver up to 30% less power with a 58% improvement in power efficiency in "lightly threaded use cases" or the same performance at half the power for sustained multithreaded workloads.

Intel claims that the 14900K will draw a power drop of 73 watts when gaming, but this varies depending on what game is being played.

Boots says it's "one the largest power reductions Intel had seen in quite a while."

If you've been struggling with a 14th Gen CPU, which is notorious for its high power draw and voltage issues, you may be interested to hear that power draw has been dramatically reduced. Lower power draw will result in easier cooling of chips, lower running costs, and more room for overclocking.

Intel claims that the Ultra 9 285K has a temperature drop of 13 degrees Celsius on average when gaming at 1080p compared to the Ultra 9 14900K.

Core Ultra 200S iGPU

The iGPU doesn't matter much for desktop chips. The first-gen Xe iGPU in the Arrow Lake S desktop chip will work just fine with the four Xe cores, even though it is not included in the chips marked 'KF' as was the case in previous generations.

Arrow Lake will be available as a mobile component (Arrow LakeH) and the GPU may get more use in that capacity. I'll say a little more because it's likely that we'll still see discrete graphics cards bundled with Arrow Lake chips in gaming notebooks. But the iGPU will be there as a low-power backup.

Lunar Lake was the first time we saw Intel's Xe2 GPU architecture, which offers some major improvements over Intel’s first Xe GPU architecture. Arrow Lake H will only offer first-gen Xe, but it does have one major improvement.

Arrow Lake H will receive additional XMX horsepower. XMX hardware is designed to accelerate workloads that are most commonly associated with AI. This 'Xe' GPU with XMX offers 77 TOPS on the GPU tile whereas the iGPU of Arrow Lake S iGPU only manages eight. This is a significant increase, but not one that I am particularly excited about. We're a fickle lot, eh!

Arrow Lake H, unlike desktop chips, will also feature native Wi-Fi 7, and Bluetooth 5.4. It's a shame that desktop chips won't have native Wi-Fi 7, but we're sure to see motherboards that integrate that newer standard.

Core Ultra 200S overclocking

Intel has also added a few improvements to the overclockers who are more savage. If you want to push Arrow Lake beyond its limits, you can tweak the core clocks by 16.67 MHz increments. Intel will also offer dual base clocks to separate tiles. There are also tile-2-tile, fabric overclocks, and a handy toggle to ignore the internal voltage control on the chip. Use that last switch at your own peril. We know what happens if the voltage is off.

AI promises to help you overclock your computer in just one click.

It's probably worth mentioning the AI component, since this is the first time Intel or anyone else has included an NPU in a desktop processor. An NPU is silicon that's dedicated to accelerating AI workloads. The NPU on Arrow Lake S, at only 13 TOPS, is a minuscule chip compared to the current generation of mobile chips. It uses the same architecture as Meteor Lake NPU.

Arrow Lake S supports DDR5-6400 memory as standard. This means you're guaranteed a certain speed, though you can still push it further with XMP. Arrow Lake also supports a variety of other memory formats, but this is dependent on motherboard manufacturers.

Interesting news

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