Intel Announces Newest Arrow Lake Laptop Processors at CES
January 6, 2025
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Intel Core Ultra Series 2 HX Processor
Summary
We are at CES and we have a bunch of announcements from Intel. From news on their lowest to highest performance laptop chips, we'll share the info so far.
Table of contents:
NEW Intel Laptop Processors Announced
Last year, Intel released their Lunar Lake "V" chips from their Core Ultra Series 2 range for premium thin and light laptops. Their older Meteor Lake (Core Ultra 9 185H) and Raptor Lake (i9-14900HX) ranges remained in more powerful laptops in 2024, but that has just changed with their newest release being announced at CES: Arrow Lake.
All included claims of performance are based on Intel's provided information, we will have to get the devices in before verifying their validity.
Arrow Lake
These new Arrow Lake chips are Intel building out the next generation of Meteor Lake. The Lunar Lake chips that were just released were partially manufactured by TSMC, whereas these ones are fully produced by Intel. Unlike Meteor Lake, however, there will be three new ranges of chips available: "U", "H", and "HX".
"U" Chips
These basically seem like a rename of the older Meteor Lake chips, where Intel will now be putting them in thin and light laptops that don't need as much performance. We have concerns about how these models will differ from the laptops shipping with Lunar Lake chips. We feel that this may end up being confusing for the consumer as they are targeting the same audience.
"H" Chips
Replacing the processors Intel currently puts in more powerful programming or content creation laptops, these H chips are designed to be better than the comparable chip by AMD. Versus the Ryzen AI 9 365 processor, they are claiming an increase of 3-18% in single and multi-core performance. For integrated graphics, it's meant to be 22% faster than the prior Meteor Lake Ultra 9 185H chip in 1080p gaming. It ties with the Ryzen 365 chip in this test.
"HX" Chips
For our most powerful and portable PCs on the market, Intel will make the HX chips available to manufacturers. These processors are supposed to see a 50% performance increase from Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite 84-100 chip and 25% more than the Ryzen AI HX 375. Oddly enough, the graphs they showed did not match these increases. AMD appears to still win in Geekbench single and multi-core, as well as Cinebench single-core. Intel's own graphs showed their only win was in Cinebench multi-core. We are excited to test this further when we get them all in.
Other Announcements
In addition to Arrow Lake news, they also announced that the Lunar Lake "V" chips would be replaced at the end of 2025 with something called Panther Lake.
Conclusion
Overall, we feel this is going to be an incremental step for Intel that will catch them up to AMD Zen 5. Of course we will have to get them in for review so make sure you're subscribed to our YouTube channel and checking the website regularly for more CES news.
Thanks for reading!