Intel Reveals Core Ultra 200 Desktop Processors: Bad News For AMD?

Intel has finally announced its Arrow Lake Core Ultra 200 desktop processors – the successors to the current 14th Gen models. The Core Ultra 9 285K is the new flagship, followed by the Core Ultra 7 265K and Core Ultra 5 245K, which are essentially the same as the old Core i9, i7 and i5 models with identical core counts too.

Intel Core Ultra 200 Specifications

However, a lot has changed. Intel has removed Hyper-Threading as a feature so each CPU has the same number of threads as it does cores. Despite the lack of this multi-threaded performance-boosting feature, Intel claims the new CPUs are still faster than the previous generation in multi-threaded tasks.

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The core counts remain the same, but there is more of an emphasis on the E-cores (efficient cores). The new Skymont E-cores have a massive 32% uplift in IPC over the those in the 14th gen models partly due to a doubling of the L2 cache bandwidth. There’s a nine percent increase in the IPC of the Lian Cove P-cores (performance cores) too, but thanks to slightly lower frequencies, performance overall is perhaps not as high as it might be.

Intel claims an average of 15% higher multi-threaded performance compared to 14th Gen models and 13% higher than AMD’s Ryzen 9000 series, with smaller gains in lightly-threaded performance.

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However, when it comes to gaming, across a range of titles there wasn’t much benefit with the Core Ultra 9 285K actually posting a one percent deficit compared to the Core i9-14900K.

Intel Core Ultra 200 Pricing

Intel’s pricing is fairly aggressive with the flagship Core Ultra 9 285K at $589. AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X is $799, the older Ryzen 9 7950X is $514, 7800X3D is $479 and 7950X3D is $618. The Core i9-14900K has recently had a price cut and retails for $469.

The Core Ultra 7 265K will cost $394, which is just $20 more than the Core i7-14700K costs currently at $373, while the Ryzen 9 9900X costs $449 and the Intel CPU also undercutting the 7800X3D by over $80 too.

Finally the Core Ultra 5 245K will cost $309 with its predecessor the Core i5-14600K sitting at $260 after a recent price cut while the Ryzen 7 9700X is at $331 while the new Intel CPU undercuts the popular 7800X3D from AMD by $170.

Intel Core Ultra 200: Drastically lower power and thermals

The key takeaway, though, is that the Core Ultra 200 series will be far more power frugal, drawing up to 165W less than the 14th gen models, with the Core Ultra 9 285K drawing on average 80W less in games.

The result of this is lower temperatures too – up to 17°C lower temperatures compared to the 14th gen models. Both these features will likely mean lower cooling requirements and cheaper CPU coolers being able to do the job as well as cheaper power supplies.

Intel Core Ultra 200 motherboards and memory

Intel is also releasing the Z890 chipset with Wi-Fi 6E and Thunderbolt 4 being integrated with options for Wi-Fi 7 and Thunderbolt 5 too. For memory, the new CPUs will support DDR5 6400 as standard (DDR4 is no longer supported) with DDR5 8000 being the sweet spot according to Intel. Sadly, the new motherboards and CPUs for that matter are not backwards compatible. The new LGA1851 socket only supports Intel Core Ultra 200 series CPUs.

It’s likely the new Intel CPUs could fare well against their Ryzen 9000 counterparts overall, but AMD undoubtedly has Ryzen 9000 X3D models arriving soon, which may tempt gamers to wait for comparisons before adding either to their Christmas wish lists.

I’ll be reviewing the new processors when they arrive so follow me here on Forbes using the blue button below, Facebook or YouTube to get the latest news and reviews.