CES 2025 — Intel Core Ultra 200H and 200HX: Arrow Lake-H processors for laptops make a show, the 18a has not said its last word

Intel may have missed the shift to AI on a very large scale, but does not intend to let the competition steal the consumer market: this 2025 edition of CES is an opportunity for the blue team to reaffirm its lead in the segment of the famous “AI PCs” – these new laptops all embedding a processor doped with NPUs, these calculation modules optimized for artificial intelligence tasks.

Artificial intelligence lacks gray matter

It’s impossible to escape Intel’s marketing hype by navigating the maze of the Vegas Strip — from the Sphere to the billboards of the buildings surroundings, AI PCs are everywhere, all the time, like an authentic revolution at the height of the first 286 chip in 1982…

Advertising, your content continues below

Our most regular readers will have understood, through our numerous tests of AI PCs already commercially available, that the name ultimately has few concrete uses. However, Intel is not deviating from its course, and too bad if the Gaudi super-accelerator has fallen into total oblivion: from the overbooked professional to the slightly lost grandmother, everyone will be entitled to their AI PC . To date, 1.5 million Lunar Lakes have been sold since their launch last year. The train is in full swing, especially since in the words of its vice-president James A. Johnson, “2025 is the year to buy a new PC“.

Preferably, a Copilot+ certified PC: the “Wintel” synergy seems stronger than ever, and Microsoft took advantage of this keynote to talk again about Phi Silica, its first SLM (Small Language Model), already teased last month. The opportunity also for the Redmond firm to remind that Windows 11, promised-sworn-spit, it’s really not that bad, and that the right time to update its OS was yesterday.

Advertising, your content continues below

Performances in the spotlight

And this lineup of the 2025 vintage, what is it? At the center of all attention are the two series of Intel Core Ultra 200H and 200HX processors, or Arrow Lake-S, intended for laptops of all kinds.
The first, Intel Core Ultra 2000H, targets systems without integrated graphics cards, and shows the muscles of its onboard iGPU.

Able to carry up to 16 cores for its three most powerful models (6 P cores, 8 E cores and 2 low-consumption E cores), it is the 8 X cores of the Intel Arc graphics part which are highlighted.

The team blue promises a significant in-game impact — 22% more performance compared to Meteor Lake-H CPUs on a selection of games, from a benchmark at 1080p and medium settings… And even more with upgrade technology the XeSS2 scale, inherited from the Battlemage graphics card released at the end of last year. To drive the point home, Intel recalled the advantages of x86 systems compared to their ARM equivalents. Yes, they are also capable of demonstrating energy efficiency, but above all benefit from native compatibility with video games… Enough to thumb their nose at Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chips. See you during the first trimester.

The Core Ultra 200HX processors, meanwhile, are intended for enthusiast laptops — a roundabout way of talking about machines equipped with a mobile graphics card. More than ever, Intel is looking to make amends and bring performance improvements back into the spotlight — “the power of a tower in a laptop“, as explained by Robert Hallock, general manager of the marketing branch. Especially in multithreading, with a performance gain of 41% for the Core Ultra 285HX compared to a 14th generation Core i9. The Core Ultra 200HX chips will arrive in laptops in the second half of the year, without further details.

Advertising, your content continues below

The presentation ended with a reminder of the various updates intended for the 200S (Arrow Lake) desktop processors. Released at the start of the 2024 school year, their performance raised a lot of confusion within the editorial staff – the potential was there, but the poor benchmarking figures raised more than one eyebrow. Since then, Intel has offered various updates since November via the Windows 11 update tool – and has reiterated two important tips for maximizing the capabilities of its chips. First, enable the Application Optimization feature via the BIOS (under the Intel DTT (Dynamic Tuning Technology) tab), but also change the Windows power mode to “Performance”.

The Panther dares

“I know you love a good chip photo“: the little surprise of this keynote was the furtive appearance of a Panther Lake chip, a code name referring to the 16th generation of processors, carried by the 18A manufacturing process. Its mass production is planned for the second part of the year 2025, and several computer manufacturers have already got their hands on it. Intel’s struggles with this new node – and the complications of its production, the efficiency of which would not exceed 10% – have not. nothing of an industry secret… It now remains to be seen when the successor to the Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake CPUs will arrive on tomorrow’s laptops.

Advertising, your content continues below