Intel Core Ultra 200 Processors Released: Surprising Performance Amidst Industry Challenges

The year 2024 has yet to bring anything more exciting for PC hardware enthusiasts. Nvidia delayed GeForce 5000 graphics until next year, AMD didn’t even give any graphics preview. Also, the processor world is still dull and gray. Mobile Meteor Lake did not inspire, Qualcomm Snapdragon is even worse. Desktop Ryzen 9000 they are unsalted, unreasonable, and the single brightest point is AMD’s mobile Ryzens.

Nothing fundamental about this situation may change even with s Drivers for Intel Core Ultra 200 i.e. Arrow Lake. Intel had to launch this series quickly to forget about the Raptor Lake issues. But at the cost of many compromises. Initially, Intel wanted to manufacture in its own factories, which failed. The lack of Hyper-Threading means a big impact on performance, even if we knew about it several months in advance. Although the performance is certainly not bad at all (with half the number of threads needed against Core i9-14900K), so the public is disappointed with the result.

AMD’s Ryzen 9000s only gave a small increase in performance, in some areas the performance was even worse (games). Intel did the same with Arrow Lake. Somewhere the performance is better than Raptor Lake, somewhere worse. We actually show it in the test and evaluate it right at the end. However, both processor manufacturers have not performed very well this year, and they have nothing to blame.

Development of Meteor Lake

It must be said that Arrow Lake is a major milestone in the development of Intel processors in every way. Intel still benefits from the core architecture, but there is less and less of it in the cores. He also turned to a tile design on the desk, which is not completely new, but only now comes in this wide form. The slag chiplet is also interesting in its construction, as each part is made using a different process at TSMC.

Everything is connected by one piece of the puzzle made by Intel, which is the Foveros 3D base layer, which connects all the chiplets in one communication unit. The rest of the processor already consists of a traditional core substrate and a heat spreader.

The architecture itself has gone through many changes against the Raptor Lacquer, but it is not very different from the Meteor Lacquer that was introduced this spring. But the lack of Hyper-Threading is still a big pain, which Intel explains that its time has already passed and that it can use the processor effectively even without it. But in my opinion, those few tens of percent of performance are just missing.

And what’s next…

A few days ago, news broke that Intel had canceled the successor of Arrow Lake Refresh on the LGA1851 platform. If this is true, then in about 2026 we will have Loch Nuhad with a different base. Because Nova Lake should bring a completely new architecture free from what’s left of the old Core now.

But this means that motherboards with the Z890 chipset may only carry one generation of processors and their lifespan is less than two years. This may deter many customers from purchasing, especially when the Raptor Lake pollution is still on their minds. Manufacturers will not have an easy time selling these new boards. Especially when we see higher prices of records again.