CES 2025: Intel Announces Core Ultra 200HX CPUs for Next-Generation Gaming Laptops

Ahead of the official kickoff of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Intel has announced a new range of mobile processors as part of the Arrow Lake family. Designed for laptops, the new 200HX CPUs will specifically target gamers with the company claiming about 5 per cent better single-thread performance and 20 per cent more multi-thread performance over the Raptor Lake-H Refresh CPUs. Intel has also announced the Core Ultra 200H and Core Ultra 200U chip families, which would go inside most premium laptops, including ultrabooks.

The new Intel Arrow Lake mobile processors will be paired with GPUs, such as the RTX 50-series, which Nvidia is set to launch at an upcoming announcement during CES 2025 . The top-of-the-line laptops, powered by the Core Ultra 9 285HX of the Core Ultra 200HX family will have 24 cores, including eight performance cores and 16 efficiency cores, up to 5.5GHz of clock speed, a 13 TOPS Neural Processing Unit (NPU), and support for 4 GPU cores. While Intel says laptops powered by this chip can handle AI — with Intel already calling them the “AI PCs”, they still do not qualify to be Microsoft’s Copilot Plus PCs. That means Intel’s Lunar Lake CPUs continue to being the only family to support Copilot Plus features.

OEMs, such as HP, Acer, Asus, Dell, Lenovo, Samsung, and MSI among others, will use the lower-specced Core Ultra 200H and Core Ultra 200U chips for people who do not want gaming laptops. While the H variants will offer a base power of 28 watts across the lineup with the Core Ultra 9 285H being the exception with a 45W power requirement, the U series will run at a base power of 15 watts — with turbo modes cranking up the requirement up to 57W.

The H series also uses the latest version of Intel Arc GPUs, previously used inside Meteor Lake chips. Intel claims this chip family is 15 per cent better in single-thread tasks. The top variant, Intel Core Ultra 9 285H, has 16 cores, including six performance, eight efficiency, and two low-power efficiency cores, alongside a boost clock speed of 5.4GHz and support for eight GPU cores. On the other hand, the top Intel Core Ultra 7 265U chip of the U family has 12 cores (two performance, eight efficiency, and two low-power efficiency cores) and a boost clock speed of 5.3GHz.

Intel’s new Arrow Lake chips will be available on laptops starting Q1, with the 200HX making their debut on gaming laptops before 200H and 200U chips.