Intel Corp. today expanded its product portfolio with more than a dozen new processors geared toward the laptop market.

The chips are joining the company’s Core Ultra 200 product line, which first debuted last year. It includes not only laptop processors but also desktop-focused silicon. Some of the chips in the series are based on compute dies that are made by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. rather than at Intel’s own fabs. 

High-end laptop chips 

Most of the new laptop processors that Intel introduced today are part of a chip family called the Core Ultra 200HX. It’s geared towards high-end laptops designed to run creative applications and video games.

There are a total of 11 new Core Ultra 200HX processors. As far as their design is concerned, they’re nearly identical to the Core Ultra 200S desktop processors that Intel debuted last year. The difference is that the company traded off some performance for lower power usage and a more compact form factor. 

The flagship Core Ultra 9 285HX includes a central processing unit with eight performance-optimized cores and 16 cores that prioritize power-efficiency. The two core clusters can achieve maximum speeds of 5.4 GHz and 2.8 GHz, respectively. There’s also a neural processing unit that manages up to 13 TOPs, or 13 trillion calculations per second, when running artificial intelligence models.

Compared with Intel’s previous-generation HX chips, the Core Ultra 200HX series provides 20% higher multi-threaded performance. Single-threaded performance is up to 5% higher. Later this year, consumers who require even more performance will have the ability to purchase laptops that combine a Core Ultra 200HX chip with an Nvidia Corp. graphics processing unit.

Power-efficiency in focus

Intel is rolling out the Core Ultra 200HX series alongside nine new chips geared towards thin, lightweight and power-efficient laptops. Those chips are organized into two collections. 

The four most power-efficient processors form a new product line called the Core Ultra 200U series. All four have two performance-optimized CPU cores, eight efficiency-optimized cores and two low-power cores that are tasked with performing auxiliary computing tasks. The chips’ maximum clock speeds range from 4.8 GHz to 5.3 GHz.

Each Core Ultra 200U processor combines its onboard CPU with an integrated GPU that includes up to four cores. The GPU is based on Intel’s Alchemist architecture, which compresses some of the data that it processes to reduce the amount of energy necessary to process it. There’s also a prefetching feature, which moves some data points into the GPU’s cache well before they’re needed to avoid processing delays later on.

The five other efficiency-optimized chips that Intel debuted today have higher power usage and performance. The new Core Ultra 200H processors, as they’re called, offer up to six performance-optimized CPU cores and eight efficiency-optimized cores. The onboard GPU has up to eight cores, or twice as many as the most advanced chip in the lower-power Core Ultra 200U series.

“Intel is only going to continue bolstering its AI PC product portfolio in 2025 and beyond as we sample our lead Intel 18A product to customers now ahead of volume production in the second half of 2025,” said Intel interim co-Chief Executive Officer Michelle Johnston Holthaus.

The new chips are rolling alongside upgrades to vPro, a suite of features that enterprises can use to manage their employees’ Intel-powered computers. Some of those features are built directly into the chipmaker’s processors.

The latest version of vPro includes a module called the Partner Security Engine that can run firmware from Intel’s partners on enterprise laptops. This includes the firmware that powers Microsoft Corp.’s Pluton coprocessor, which offloads some cybersecurity tasks from a laptop’s CPU. The Partner Security Engine runs firmware in isolation from the other applications on a computer to reduce the risk of breaches.

The latest vPro release also includes new out-of-band troubleshooting tools. Out-of-band software works even when key components on which a computer relies to work, such as the operating system, are malfunctioning. Intel says the new troubleshooting features in vPro ease tasks such as restoring a laptop after a failure.

For video game enthusiasts, in turn, Intel will provide the ability to overclock some of its high-end Core Ultra 200HX laptop chips. Overclocking increases a chip’s top frequency beyond the default maximum. Intel’s implementation of the feature allows users to speed up not only the CPU in a Core Ultra 200HX CPU chip but also the die-to-die interconnect that links the CPU to the processor’s other components.

Image: Intel