Latest news with #CoreUltra200
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Intel Price Cut Makes Core Ultra 200 CPU Far More Competitive
Intel has slashed the prices of one of its latest-generation desktop processors, making it far more competitive with AMD's alternatives. The Core Ultra 7 265KF is now just $294 after a $100 price drop. That undercuts the comparable AMD Ryzen 9700X by a few dollars and makes it only a few dollars more expensive than the notably weaker Core Ultra 5 245KF. That probably means we'll soon see more price drops of Intel's other Core Ultra 200 chips in the near future. When Intel launched its Core Ultra 200 "Arrow Lake" processors in the fall of 2024, they debuted to muted fanfare. Although the productivity performance was strong, especially since Intel had dropped Hyper-Threading support from its top chips for the first time in over a decade, gaming capabilities were decidedly lacklustre. Indeed, the top-tier 285K actually fell behind the last-generation 14900K in most games, and the rest of the stack was equally uninspiring. Comparable prices to AMD's top chips gave Team Red a significant advantage in mindshare and ultimately sales. Credit: Amazon But Intel is looking to secure at least a place as the value buy with this latest move. The 265KF is a powerful CPU for professional tasks, and decent for gaming too—just not as impressive as AMD's X3D counterparts. But now that the 265KF is cheaper than the 9700X, it's in a really interesting position. It offers comparable gaming performance to the AMD chip and much greater productivity performance. With its 20 total cores, it runs rings round the 9700X's mere eight in some applications, although in apps where you can't use those cores, the difference is less dramatic. Intel's Core Ultra 200s also come with a capable onboard GPU and NPU. Credit: Intel Another real standout success of this generation of Intel CPUs is the efficiency. Where Intel was criticized in previous generations for demanding too much power for too little gain, the Core Ultra 200 chips offer much more performance per watt. That's just the same for the 265KF, making it a good choice for leaner builds that want to run cool and quiet. Equally so, you can also dump a lot of extra power into chips like this to boost performance if you wish, making them quite versatile for anyone willing to do the tweaking. Intel performance updates since the launch of the 200-series have also raised the bar for all new CPUs in the range, so don't judge them purely by your initial impressions from last year. They also support the latest memory standards. New CUDIMM memory designs can run in excess of 8,000 MHz, and you will only find support for that on the Core Ultra 200 range of motherboards. AMD and older Intel CPUs will simply run at sub-XMP/EXPO speeds. In the right apps and settings, that faster memory support could be another great selling point for the 265KF. Interested in other CPU deals this month? Here are the best prices on the latest chips we can find.
Yahoo
14-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Intel Performance Optimized PCs Could Make Arrow Lake More Competitive
Intel might soon be offering performance-optimized (IPO) gaming PCs in various territories, after some unique designs showed up in China with increased power limits, higher memory frequencies, and factory overclocks for the various CPU cores. Options include 14th Generation CPUs and Intel's newer Core Ultra 200 Arrow Lake processors, which could help make them more competitive with AMD following an underwhelming launch. Intel's Arrow Lake processors debuted at the end of 2024 to muted acclaim. While they are strong at productivity workloads and are more energy efficient than their predecessors, they fell behind both AMD and Intel's own previous 14th generation on gaming. Intel went on to announce its Intel Performance Optimization, or IPO platform, at CES 2025 in January, and now we have the first examples of such builds. They include broad-scale overclocking and some sizeable power limit increases, which have the potential to make a sizeable difference in system performance. This news comes from popular leaker Uniko's Hardware, which shows a few specification tables for a number of systems. Most of them are based on Intel's 14th generation, such as the 14600KF and 14700KF. However, there's also a notable entry for the Core Ultra 7 265K. It's listed as having a boost clock of 5.7GHz, which is 200MHz higher than the base configuration. But that's not the only tweaks that the IPO process makes. Uniko claims that this system has also had its efficiency core boost clock raised from 4.6GHz to 4.9GHz, the NGU clock increased from 2.6GHz to 3.1GHz, and the die-to-die interface has been overclocked from 2.1GHz to 3.1GHz. Those are some sizeable overclocks, and though they are unlikely to offer linear performance increases, they may be more significant than just increasing the clock on the P cores alone. In addition to clock speed bosts, the 265K has reportedly had its power limits lifted substantially. The PL1 limit is now 280W, rising from a modest 125W, and now it can reach 350W in the PL2 state (if adequately cooled), where before it was locked to just 250W. It's also paired with a new 8,000MHz memory kit with tightened timings and has a few microcode fixes to enhance CPU performance in general. This combination of changes could have a big impact on CPU performance and could make them far more competitive. Now we just need to wait to see if these IPO enhancements become more widely available. If you manage to get one, make sure you don't update to the latest Windows 11 version. It'll reverse your performance upgrade real fast.
Yahoo
06-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
'It's not just about power and performance anymore': Intel says its leveling up AI PCs for business
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Intel is trying to make debacles like the Cloudstrike outage of 2024 a thing of the past. At MWC in Barcelona, Intel announced vPro commercial editions of the "Arrow Lake" family of Intel Core Ultra chipsets, including the Core Ultra 200U, H, HX, and S suffixes, so the entire Intel Core Ultra 200 series now has vPro enterprise-ready variants. With the full slate of Core Ultra 200 series CPUs available for commercial use, Intel's enterprise portfolio will cover the gamut of powerful compute performance to high power efficiency with the embedded hardware security Intel's vPro systems are known for. 'You see serious gen-over-gen, double-digit plus/minus performance gain,' Intel's vice president of the Client Computing Group and general manager of Client Segments, David Feng tells Laptop Mag. Alongside the new hardware, Intel also announced new service updates to the vPro platform to make it easier for companies to enroll in Intel's Fleet Services for active support in case of major outages. 'It's not just about power and performance anymore, it's multiple pillars that you need to look at from a commercial perspective. It's security, manageability, systems stability, and sustainability,' Intel's General Manager of Commercial Client Segments, Jennifer Larson, tells Laptop Mag. With the new Intel Core Ultra 200U, 200H, 200HX, and 200S vPro variants, the entire Core Ultra 200 series is now commercially viable. The Core Ultra 200H and HX series offer up to 20% increases in multithread performance compared to the Intel Core Ultra 100 and Intel 14th gen CPUs. While we have yet to get our hands on an Intel Core Ultra 200HX system for testing, we were able to confirm Intel's performance claims on a few launch systems for the "Arrow Lake" 200H series. If we see similar performance from the 200HX, that would make the Core Ultra 200 series a worthwhile upgrade even for users on newer systems. But for enterprise customers who tend to work on a three to five-year upgrade cycle, the Core Ultra 200 series is a massive overhaul across raw computing power and efficiency when compared against Intel's 11th gen CPUs, offering up to 2.84x higher multicore performance in Cinebench 2024 and nearly 2x faster video editing. 'For commercial, given that four years is kind of the plus/minus refresh cycle, we compared against the 11th gen,' Feng explains. 'As you can imagine, massive, massive gain across the board for almost 3x the MT [multithreaded] performance.' But Intel's vPro systems include more than just powerful commercial hardware. Intel vPro chipsets come with hardware and software security systems designed for commercial purposes. Intel started the vPro line 19 years ago to meet the needs of IT professionals, and includes fleet deployment systems, increased security and manageability, connectivity, and device stability with a reported 99.7% app compatibility. Intel's vPro Fleet Service is an SaaS (software-as-a-service) commercial solution is being upgraded for an easier enrollment process, dropping the enrollment steps from 24 down to six, and the new Fleet Services will no longer require on-premises servers. So businesses that didn't enroll or did not meet the requirements previously can recover faster from disruptions. Intel vPro Fleet Services is in a private preview now and will be available in the coming weeks. Intel vPro will also be integrated into Microsoft Intune, coming later this year. Intel also introduced the Intel Assured Supply Chain (ASC) program, which will offer customers greater visibility and assurance in the silicon manufacturing process. So, customers with enhanced security needs can be aware of the entire chain of custody for each chip. 'We just came out with our product security report,' Larson tells Laptop. 'A third-party evaluation firm rated us number one as compared to our competitors in security assurance. We break what we build.' Intel Core Ultra 200V systems with the Intel vPro platform are currently available. Intel Core Ultra 200U, 200H, 200HX, and 200S series systems with vPro are expected to ship in late March 2025. Intel's vPro Fleet Services is in preview and will be available generally in the next few weeks, while the Intel Assured Supply Chain program will start later this year, likely in late Summer or Fall 2025. While Intel's Arrow Lake 200S desktop chips saw a number of performance issues at launch, Intel has worked to patch that experience for better, more consistent performance and efficiency gains. Arrow Lake 200H saw a successful launch last month and the first 200HX systems are expected in the coming weeks. The vPro editions of these chips will be launching around the same time frame, offering a wide range of chips to meet the needs of multiple industries and jobs. On the heels of major service outages and security failures from the competiton, the robust hardware and software security value makes Intel vPro a more attractive solution than ever. And the new vPro chips do offer on-device AI for additional security and commercial features. For gamers and general consumers, vPro isn't much of a concern, but the enterprise business is a massive market for Intel, and the company is dedicated to maintaining that lead. Intel's enterprise business helps the company build better gaming and AI chipsets and develop affordable discrete GPUs. After all of the buyout rumors and the loss of former CEO Pat Gelsinger, today's vPro news is a reminder that Intel is still a company with plenty of success to its name. Best AI PCs in 2025: 6 laptops I recommend for the latest AI features A Windows 11 update has tanked performance on some Intel CPUs — Here's what it means for you Lenovo debuts a solar laptop that plays 1 hour of video from 20 minutes of sunlight Sign in to access your portfolio
