Intel has announced the new Core Ultra 200HX and 200H laptop chips here at CES 2025. The HX parts are the most interesting to PC gamers, as the chips most likely to power your next gaming laptop, so let's get into those first.
There are six new HX models, with the top Intel Core Ultra 9 285HX offering up eight Performance-cores (Lion Cove) and 16 Efficient-cores (Skymont) for a total of 24 threads. Remember, there's no Hyper-Threading on the Lion Cove P-cores used here, so what you see is what you get. The 285HX features a P-core Turbo of 5.5 GHz.
That equates to an increase in performance of roughly 5%, by Intel's internal testing, for single-thread versus the last generation Raptor Lake Refresh chips. It also reckons we'll see a big uplift in multithreaded performance of around 20%, which bears out with the desktop chips.
The HX-series will run at a base power draw of 55 W, though can ramp up to 160 W when required. That's a pretty chunky power demand—that's a Turbo power actually 3 W higher than the 14900HX. So we'll have to see how that plays out in gaming laptop designs surrounding these chips.
That said, Jim Johnson, SVP of Intel's Client Computing Group, said of the HX Series: "plus it's about 40% more efficient than the our previous generation, leaving more headroom for discrete graphics to to stretch its legs."
"It's kind of a one-two punch."
Which all sounds more promising than maybe the specs allude to, but Intel says we'll find out more at a later date. Assumedly when some new GPUs come out, which is expected to happen any day now.
What's a little more interesting is that these chips support at least one exciting new memory form factor, CAMM2. CAMM2 is a like system RAM, only pancaked onto the motherboard for greater cooling. It's still removable, though, so could make for some interesting applications in gaming laptops specifically.
In terms of integrated GPU performance, these are not equipped with the mighty powerful GPU that we've seen in Lunar Lake or its competitors. Just 4/3 Xe GPU cores across this lineup, which won't be great for gaming. These chips will, of course, be paired with discrete GPUs instead.
When it comes to AI performance, which I know you're all clamouring to find out about, the NPU within the HX-series is only capable of a middling 13 TOPS. That's not enough to bag any sort of Microsoft Copilot+ certification.
The H Series maxes out with fewer threads the HX Series, at just 16 threads total. The Core Ultra 9 285H has six P-cores (Lion Cove), 8 E-cores (Skymont), and 2 Low-power E-cores. Yep, it's quite a bit like Meteor Lake in that regard, though the newer architecture still offers some benefits over Meteor Lake—15% single-thread and multithread versus Meteor Lake, according to Intel.
It also has a specially tweaked Xe GPU with more AI acceleration, from a new XMX engine. Quite a bit more, in fact, up to 77 TOPS.
We'll probably see a wide mix of chips in the next-generation of gaming laptops, between these new HX Series, H Series, V Series, and then AMD's options, including the Ryzen AI chips.
As for the HX Series gaming laptops, likely to make up a lot of gaming models alongside a discrete GPU, those are coming in late Q1. 200H chips will turn up "early Q1", which should be any day now.
We'll see more as CES 2025 unfolds. We're at the show, so stay tuned for all that.
