Intel has officially broken cover with its new Core Ultra 200S Plus Series. As previously rumoured and reported, the series adds two new SKUs to the Arrow Lake series: the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus.
As Robert Hallock, VP and GM of Enthusiast Channel Business, Intel, the meat of the 270K Plus and 250K Plus get more cores than their direct predecessors; the 270K Plus gets four more E-Cores, raising its total core count to 24-cores, while the 250K Plus gets the same as well, along with a slight 100MHz bump in its boost clock at 5.3GHz.
While it doesn’t seem like much, Hallock points out that the “real magic” with the 200S Plus CPU series is the frequency of other things inside the CPU, such as the link between the CPU cores and the RAM. Overall, Hallock claims that it has managed to wring out up to 900MHz in Direct-to-Device (D2D) frequency. This performance increase would drive down latency and, naturally, drive up performance.
These improvements, Intel says, deliver up to 100% performance improvement in content creation of its competitor in multithreaded workload. It’s a blatant irony, seeing that the chipmaker simply ditched its hyperthreading technology on its consumer segment CPU.
When it comes to gaming, the new Core Ultra 200S Plus CPUs provide up to 15% better performance on average when compared to their immediate predecessor, with some titles providing as much as 43% improvement in performance.
One new technology Intel is introducing with the Core Ultra 200S Plus Series is the self-titled Binary Optimisation Tool. Per Hallock’s explanation, the tool takes an existing workload, understand exactly how it is using the CPU, and if it is not as optimal as it could be, it restructures and streamlines that application to work better on Intel’s x86 architecture. To put it in another way, it converts from console or competitor x86, to Intel x86, leading to better utilisation of the cache, pipeline — basically, more instructions per cycle.
The Intel Core Ultra 200S Plus series will be available starting 26 March. The CPUs will work with currently existing 800 Series motherboards but you’ll need to update their BIOS accordingly. At the same time, Intel says that its AIB partners are also releasing new motherboards to accommodate the new CPUs.
Pricing starts at US$199 (~RM782) for the Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus, and US$299 (~RM1,175) for the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus.
