Intel announces new Core Ultra 200 series mobile CPUs at CES 2025, targeting enthusiasts and edge users

Intel announced its latest series of mobile processors at CES 2025, the Intel Core Ultra 200HX series, the Core Ultra 200H series, and the Core Ultra 200U series, targeting enthusiasts, premium, and thin and light laptop users, respectively.

The new chips, hot on the heels of the incredibly well-received Intel Lunar Lake chips (sold as the Intel Core Ultra 200V series), offer even more variety of processing power for users who found the Core Ultra 200V series to be good, but not quite powerful enough for their needs.

The new chip lines, which are built off the same Intel Arrow Lake architecture used in the Intel Core Ultra 200S series desktop processors (including the Intel Corez Ultra 9 285K and Core Ultra 5 265K), have a bit of an expectations problem.

Arrow Lake for desktop was rather underwhelming (for gamers at least) at launch and the arguably more advanced Intel Lunar Lake laptop chips currently on the market are simply some of the best laptop processors anyone has ever made, so following that up with an already maligned architecture will be tough.

That said, Intel Arrow Lake has a lot going for it, especially once you step away from gaming. In everyday and professional workloads. On desktop, The Intel Core Ultra 200S series chips came out pretty much even with the previous-gen Intel Raptor Lake Refresh chips (Intel's Core 14000 series), while using less power to do so. The hope, it appears, is that Intel is offering at least even or better laptop chip performance compared to the previous generation with meaningfully less power consumption, something that actually matters for laptops.

It remains to be seen if any of this will sway anyone expecting big performance gains, but at least for these mobile chips, improved energy efficiency could be enough to tip the scales in their favor.

New Intel mobile SKUs

Here are all of the new Intel Core Ultra 200HX, Core Ultra 200H, and Core Ultra 200U SKUs announced during Intel's CES 2025 keynote.

There are some notable things about the specs we've gotten on these new SKUs.

For one, only the Core Ultra 200H series has integrated Intel Arc graphics, while the HX and U series chips all opt for the basic, lower-end Intel Graphics GPU. This makes some sense, as the 200HX series will likely be paired with a discrete GPU, so the basic integrated GPU will be more than enough for basic Windows use to save power.

The 200U series, meanwhile, won't have a discrete GPU, but it also won't likely be called upon to do any heavy-duty graphics like 3D gaming, so Intel Graphics is fine for the U series.

The 200H series, however, might need to do a little bit more gaming or video processing/encoding than the U series, but not enough to get a discrete GPU, so Intel opted to give it its higher-end integrated Arc GPU.

This is likely the same integrated Arc graphics found in Intel Meteor Lake chips since Arrow Lake is largely built off that architecture rather than the more advanced Lunar Lake Xe2 graphics. It also has a higher max TDP, likely to account for more GPU power than the other two chip series.

We also don't have the max clock for the E-cores and LPE-cores on the 200H and 200U series SKUs yet, but hopefully, Intel will provide more detail in the days ahead.

The battle of the Core Ultra 200 series chips

I'll be honest, there's simply no getting around how good Intel's recent laptop chips are (the Intel Core Ultra 200V series, based on Lunar Lake).

Intel has had an Apple problem ever since Apple moved to its own M-series silicon based on ARM's BIG.little processor design, with several generations of its laptop chips simply not being able to keep pace with the best Apple had to offer.

However, all that changed with Intel Lunar Lake, released late last year. While Lunar Lake laptop chips still lag well behind Apple's latest M4 chips, they are more than capable enough that you'd only be able to tell the difference if you had the two side-by-side.

Meanwhile, Lunar Lake's greatly improved energy efficiency and powerful integrated GPU based on Intel Arc Battlemage architecture turned out to be an incredibly powerful combo that offered incredible battery life on a Windows PC to rival even the best MacBook Air models and a GPU powerful enough to play the best PC games remarkably well for a thin and light laptop processor.

Intel Lunar Lake isn't an enthusiast-class processor, however, and those who demand the highest levels of performance from their laptops, whether for work or play, haven't had much to look forward to for a least a year or more.

Needless to say, there's a lot of pressure on Intel's newest laptop chips to avoid the mistakes that undercut their desktop counterpart, and it remains to be seen if Intel can deliver.

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