Latest news with #ArrowLake-H
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
It's Alive: Intel's Next-Gen ‘Panther Lake' Silicon Shows a Second Proof of Life
PCMag editors select and review products independently. If you buy through affiliate links, we may earn commissions, which help support our testing. TAIPEI—At a prebriefing at Computex, beleaguered chip maker Intel didn't have big CPU news to share around new-to-market silicon. It touted its design wins and positive reception for its 'Arrow Lake-H' mobile CPUs, and its earlier (April) launch of its intriguing Core 200S Boost. Core 200S Boost is a performance-enhancement initiative for its latest-gen desktop K-class chips (like the Core Ultra 9 285K) that enables single-click memory overclocking, power-settings tweaks, and clock-speed upticks that nonetheless keep users within warranty. (Given Core 200S's reputation as a bit of a performance fizzle for PC gamers, this is a clear response to that.) However, one interesting development: Next-gen 'Panther Lake' (which should be better known, when it launches, as Intel's Core Ultra 300) emerged here as working silicon, shown for the first time running commercial software. At a private suite briefing, Intel showed off two early-silicon validation platforms in open-top desktop cases, as well as a small-form-factor development kit. According to Intel, Panther Lake should be entering full production in the first half of 2025, with the expected launch of the new chips in the first systems in early 2026. The core design in Panther Lake, according to the company, will share much with Arrow Lake-H, but the efficiency story should be closer to that of "Lunar Lake," the Core Ultra 200V chips that are showing up in many recent long-running ultraportable laptops. Panther Lake will support LPDDR5 memory, and its integrated graphics (IGP) performance, according to the company, will approach that of Lunar Lake, and be based on a new IGP design. Based on Intel's upcoming 18A node, Panther Lake is poised to be a key advance for Intel, assuming it goes off well. In one of the larger reference platforms, on its chassis-attached screen, Intel showed an LLM being run under the umbrella of the old Windows Clippy in an AI workload. The other system was running DaVinci Resolve, and the Panther chip was being shown running effects and adding titling to a piece of footage. The AI workload and the DaVinci effects ran smoothly, but we could only say so anecdotally; no performance numbers were shared. We also saw a development-kit desktop, along the lines of small form factor PCs from companies like Shuttle or ECS, based on Panther Lake. The two much larger reference platforms were running on development motherboards with active cooling, like so... This dev kit model would seem to be a more thermally constrained design. We saw it applying effects to an image in the popular media editor Topaz AI, shown below. Intel also showed off a handful of early OEM Panther Lake laptop chassis from design partners including Compal, Wistron, and Eventec. These are all thin-and-light laptops of the kind that have tended to show up as Lunar Lake models. More details are expected later this year, as Panther Lake gets closer to launch; we'd expect a lot more details, if not outright testing samples, by CES 2026.
Yahoo
11-02-2025
- Yahoo
Intel needed a win — its new laptop CPU delivers just that
It feels cliche at this point, but it's true. Intel can't catch a break. The new Arrow Lake-H chips feel like a tide shift for Team Blue, though, leveraging the highly efficient architectures the company debuted with Lunar Lake to deliver performance and battery life worthy of the best laptops on the market. We've already seen what Intel's Lunar Lake processors are capable of — read our Asus Zenbook S 14 review for more on that — but these new Arrow Lake-H offerings are a bit different. Under the hood, Intel is still using its Lion Cove and Skymont core architectures, which Arrow Lake-H shares with Lunar Lake. However, these chips get a larger core count, higher power budget, and beefier integrated graphics based on Intel's Battlemage architecture. The power budget is really important here. The base power is 45W, but Intel allows the chip to boost up to 115W for short periods of time. The core split is interesting, too. You get 16 total cores, but they're split between six performance cores, eight efficient cores, and two low-power efficient cores. If you remember, the efficient cores are actually the main performance driver in this architecture, so the extra two low-power ones are simply there for a little extra multi-core grunt. I've brought in a few comparisons from AMD here. First is an identical laptop packing the Ryzen AI 9 365 — which Intel compares the Core Ultra 9 285H to — and second is an Asus Zenbook S 16 with a beefier Ryzen AI 9 HX 370. These are 10-core and 12-core CPUs, respectively, but they use simultaneous multi-threading. The Core Ultra 9 285H doesn't, so while Intel has a core advantage, AMD actually has a thread advantage. MSI Prestige 16 (Core Ultra 9 285H) MSI Prestige 16 (Ryzen 9 AI 365) Asus Zenbook S 16 (Ryzen AI 9 HX 370) Cinebench R24 (single/multi) 128 / 918 111 / 819 110 / 871 Geekbench 6 (single/multi) 2,776 / 15,773 2,832 / 14,059 N/A PCMark 10 7,508 7,352 7,229 PugetBench for Photoshop 7,717 7,656 7,248 PugetBench for Premiere Pro 3,520 3,107 2,971 3DMark Time Spy 4,018 3,565 3,207 3DMark Steel Nomad Light 3,494 3,088 3,219 Intel's approach clearly works, as you can see in both Cinebench and Geekbench. These apps typically favor a thread advantage, but Intel is still coming out on top. That's probably due to a solid lead in single-core speed, which you can see in Cinebench. PCMark 10 is a bit different, with all three laptops more or less falling in the same range. That's not too surprising. These are high-end CPUs in some of the best laptops money can buy, so of course they can handle basic office and productivity tasks with ease. The difference makers are Photoshop and Premiere. Intel is providing a slight edge in Photoshop, but there's a massive boost in Premiere. The Battlemage GPU is certainly helping there, along with QuickSync. Gaming sees a huge boost, as well — frankly, AMD isn't even close with its integrated graphics, at least until we see the Ryzen AI MAX chips later this year. Intel is no stranger to performance, and frankly, it's not impressive that Intel can outclass the competition (especially considering the larger power budget). What is impressive is that Intel is able to deliver this level of performance while keeping its battery life in check. It was very strange queuing up a video to loop on the Core Ultra 9 285H when I left work, only to find it still looping the next morning, and with around half the battery to spare. That's the kind of efficiency Intel is offering here and without any of the typical tricks in Windows that kick in when the battery gets low enough. In local video playback, I got nearly 21 hours of battery life out of the MSI Prestige 16 — 20 hours and 46 minutes, to be exact. For context, the Acer Swift 14 AI with the Ryzen AI 9 365 managed 18 hours and 36 minutes, the MacBook Air M3 lasted 19 hours and 29 minutes, and the HP Omnibook X with the Snapdragon X Elite stayed on for 22 hours and 4 minutes. The Snapdragon chip comes out on top, but Intel is damn close considering this is a 16-core flagship chip. I expected decent battery life given that Intel is using the same core architectures as its Lunar Lake offerings, but with more cores and a higher budget, I didn't expect this Arrow Lake-H chip to be as close as it is to Intel's Lunar Lake offerings. Not only is Intel's performance fantastic here — its battery life holds up equally as well. Something struck me when testing Intel's new Arrow Lake-H chip. It just worked. Intel has really struggled to catch a break, and although its Lunar Lake laptop chips were a small highlight, they weren't enough to reverse the narrative established by the desktop Arrow Lake range. Arrow Lake-H makes a lot of sense, though, and it proves Intel was onto something when it decided to focus on efficiency. Now, finally, we can see how Intel is able to scale its design to deliver great performance and battery life in a single package. It's a great change of pace for Intel, who up to this point struggled to provide a clean ramp between performance and efficiency in laptops, rather splitting the ranges in half with two completely different approaches to architecture. Arrow Lake-H feels like everything coming together, and for a company that's been promising that everything will come together soon for years, that's a big win.
Yahoo
10-02-2025
- Yahoo
Intel Core Ultra 7 255H lands 32% faster than the 155H in PassMark's single-core benchmark
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Intel's Arrow Lake-based Core Ultra 7 255H appears to have been tested in PassMark, where it outperformed its Meteor Lake equivalent by 32% in single-threaded tests (via x86deadandback at X). Across a wide variety of metrics, the 255H is roughly 15% faster in CPU Mark, which is PassMark's proprietary metric for gauging a CPU's performance. Intel revealed its Arrow Lake-H family of processors at CES, shortly followed by a user review at Bilibili, which left much to be desired from these CPUs. Dubbed Core Ultra 200H, these processors employ Intel's Arrow Lake architecture featuring Lion Cove P-cores and Skymont E-cores. What separates them from desktop chips, apart from the power envelope, is that these CPUs feature an LPE (Low Power Efficient) core cluster on the SoC Tile, a feature reused from Meteor Lake. Unlike Lunar Lake which uses Battlemage (Xe2) graphics, Arrow Lake-H is armed with up to eight Xe-LPG+ (Alchemist+) cores with support for XMX. As the SoC Tile remains unchanged, Arrow Lake-H's NPU is capable of dishing out just 13 TOPS of INT8 performance, versus 45 TOPS on Lunar Lake. What is similar to Lunar Lake is the process node: TSMC's N3B, a step-up from Intel 4 used with Meteor Lake. The Core Ultra 7 255H in question packs 16 cores, divided into six P-cores, eight E-cores, and two LPE-cores with 16 threads in total, as Arrow Lake lacks hyperthreading support. The Core Ultra 7 155H on the contrary is equipped with a similar layout but 22 threads. In PassMark's single-core benchmark, the 255H blazes past its predecessor, scoring 4,631 points compared to the 155H's 3,500 points for a 32% lead. This is a direct result of the updated Lion Cove P-cores and N3B process, allowing a 300 MHz bump in boost clocks. When aggregated, the CPU Mark rating puts Arrow Lake ahead by around 15%. Relatively speaking, efficiency remains the Achilles' heel of these chips, as the 16-core Core Ultra 9 285H failed to beat the 10-core Ryzen AI 9 365 when limited to 50W of power. While Arrow Lake-H offers an updated Compute Tile and a slightly modified Graphics Tile, the SoC, and IOE Tiles are largely carried over from Meteor Lake. It all comes down to how these laptops are priced since Strix Point devices still have an entry price of around $1,000. On that note, it is important to mention that the 15W variant of these Intel chips, Core Ultra 200U, is reported to be based on Meteor Lake with Redwood Cove+ P-cores and Crestmont+ E-cores fabbed on Intel 3, a node once reserved for Intel's server counterparts. This will allow Intel to extract higher margins with possibly lower prices for us, though we haven't exactly found affordable Arrow Lake laptops to be abundant, at least not yet.
