Intel quietly revealed the mobile version of its “Arrow Lake Refresh” processors on Tuesday, adding both the Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus and Ultra 7 270HX Plus in a bid to capture the gaming laptop space.
Last week, Intel debuted its Core Ultra 200S Plus series for desktop PCs, trying to overcome a somewhat mediocre launch of its older “Arrow Lake” chips. Intel’s two new Arrow Lake Refresh chips offer the same upgrades: a 900MHz increase in die-to-die frequency between the memory controller and CPU, as well as the Intel Binary Optimization Tool, a still somewhat unknown way of optimizing game code so that it runs better on Intel processors.
Intel also said that the platform will include discrete (not integrated) Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, and Thunderbolt 5. The latter technology means that the older 40Gbps Thunderbolt 4 technology will likely continue being our preferred technology for the best Thunderbolt docks.
Here are the details of the two new mobile chips:
- Intel Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus: 24 cores (8 P-cores, 16 E-cores, up to 5.5GHz), 36MB Smart cache
- Intel Core Ultra 7 270HX Plus: 20 cores (8 P-cores, 12 E-cores, up to 5.3GHz), 30MB Smart cache
It appears that Intel will keep selling its older Arrow lake-HX chips, as the company showed the two platforms fitting together in the same product hierarchy.
Intel said that the Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus delivers 8 percent faster gaming performance than the Core Ultra 9 285HX, along with 7 percent faster performance in single treaded applications. Intel also used the circa-2022 Core Ultra i9-12900HX as a benchmark for gaming comparisons, claiming that gamers would see 62 percent faster gaming performance and about a 30 percent increase in single-threaded performance. It will face a strong performance from its own Panther Lake productivity chips, which games quite capably from its own integrated GPUs.
The gen-over-gen upgrade is also slightly muddied by the IBOT tool, which can offer substantial performance gains. In the chart below, IBOT is designated by a small asterisk next to the game’s name.
Intel Core Ultra 200HX Plus-powered systems will be available from our OEM partners throughout the year, beginning today. PC vendors include Acer, Asus, Colorful, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Maingear, Mechrevo, MSI, Origin, Puget and Razer.
