Intel Core Ultra 200S CPU Review
What’s New?
What’s New?
With every new launch you get a lot of press materials. The Intel Arrow Lake Ultra range is no exception. We’ll give you a few words for each slide, but primarily the slides themselves have been carefully chosen to show the important bits. There are way more than these available, but PR people and managers are paid to repeat themselves on endless slides all saying the same thing. It’s “this could’ve been an email” the 65 page PDF. We sift them so you don’t have to.
Efficient and cooler are words you’ll come across a lot here. It’s also what we’ve been banging the drum about for three generations now. We love insane performance. However, we very much dislike having triple radiators running 100% fans just to make them usable.
More companies need to do an this style of “at a glance” overview. We last saw one with the Gigabyte Aorus Master. It’s just the all-killer no-filler version. We like it very much. Obviously regular readers will know we only care about measured performance here at OC3D. We’re sure “deeper queuing for better parallelism” is an engineers dream, but we just want to know its effect upon the number at the end of our testing.
Block diagrams are one of life’s things. Some people, the boss for example, love them. The main takeaway is that there is plenty of L2 Cache per E and P Core on the Intel Ultra 200S range of processors. There is also a big chunk of L3 Cache that gets shared across all the cores.
Comparisons
It’s brave of Intel to show how Arrow Lake compares to the Core i9-14900K. You would imagine the famous Core i9 power draw and temperature requirements would be slid under the rug. Instead they are pointing them out. 40%+ efficiency improvement on single threaded tasks is insane. As we will show you during our testing, although these numbers aren’t quite what we attained, they aren’t far off.
Multi-core performance is also promised to be generally better. We know that performance improvements are a given with a new launch. It is, however, rare to get such a focus upon efficiency that also happens to bring the regular 15% ish improvement. It’s even rarer to get a company going “yep, the competition spanked us”, as Intel have with the Ryzen 9 9950X here.
This is what we want. My goodness the 14th Gen stuff was crazy good and crazy hot. If we can get the same performance but at significantly lower temperatures… Sunlit uplands.
Heat is work and work is heat, as we all know from James Joule. You can’t get performance without generating heat. You can’t get performance without using energy. Energy use generates heat, as anyone who exercises can attest. By reducing the power demands on the Intel Ultra processors by 80W when compared to the extant flagship, thus you get cooler performance. Nice.
