Intel shores up its desktop CPU lineup with boosted Core Ultra 200S Plus chips

New CPUs are a bit faster and a bit cheaper than the ones they replace.

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[niwax]

At a time where too much is going the other direction, I'll certainly take it.

I'd go even further and say 4 more cores and a $100 reduction in MSRP ist pretty fantastic for a minor iteration in the same generation. Now, there is the small issue of whether that makes them in any way good CPUs compared to what others are offering...

 

[mekantti]

That's certainly not a bad thing but if gaming was your focus even 15% improvement is still going to be noticeably behind a 9800x3D. That should be enough that it's at least consistently ahead of their 13th/14th gen processors. I guess if you want both gaming performance and multi-threaded performance this might make them a better option in that scenario. The pricing does look pretty good with the Ultra 7 270k being ~300 vs ~450 for a 9800x3D. If RAM/SSDs weren't so stupidly inflated it might make for an appealing part but I think most people are just sitting and waiting right now unless they absolutely have to buy/upgrade.

If Intel could have figured out a way to stay with LGA 1700 and only require motherboard upgrades when the actually competitive CPUs arrived (even if they had only supported 1700 DDR5 motherboards for this gen CPUs), these CPUs would be quite interesting as an upgrade path - kind of like AM4 was and still is for AMD. I'm sure there were technical reasons for doing what they did, but...

 

[AlaskanDruid]

“E” cores. Aka. Do nothing cores. Nope.

And nothing for the 9? Yikes!

 

[Barleyman]

I hope Intel will consider to significantly accelerate its microarchitectures' cadence.

One genuinely mind-blowing result:

• The MacBook Neo A18 Pro is a cheap ~$55 mobile SoC, used on two-year-old iPhones.
• It's cooled by nothing but a thin plate of copper: no finned heatsink, no fans, nothing.
• Ars found it power throttles significantly on 1T load, to maintain a sustained 4W TDP.
• And after all that, the A18 Pro scores 134 points on Cinebench 2024 Single Core.

One hundred and thirty-four points. On a power-throttled, passively cooled, tiny-die SoC. That may mean nothing, until you see what it compares to in Arrow Lake, also produced on a TSMC N3 variant (N3B).

CPU	Cinebench 2024 Single Core
Intel U7 285K	144 points
Intel i9-14900K	137 points
Intel U7 265K	135 points
A18 Pro	134 points
Intel Ultra 245K	132 points
Intel X9 388H	130 points
Intel i9-14900	129 points

How's the fps with RTX 5080 on Indy Great Circle?

 

[ZippyPeanut]

How's the fps with RTX 5080 on Indy Great Circle?

Sorry. Apple will only pair it with an external Bondi Blue ATI 3D Rage. FPS: 1.

 

[L0neW0lf]

Weeelll Sugarjets, I just bought a 9950X3D, my first major AMD CPU since the Athlon 64 X2 days. /s

(I mean, yes, I really did, but I'm still not upset that I did)

 

[ikjadoon]

CPU	Cinebench 2024 Single Core
Intel U7 285K	144 points
Intel i9-14900K	137 points
Intel U7 265K	135 points
A18 Pro - Ars Techinca	134 points - Ars Technica
Intel Ultra 245K	132 points
Intel X9 388H	130 points
Intel i9-14900	129 points

Interestingly, Notebookcheck has also run Cinebench 2024 and they are getting ~9% higher performance. Because A18 Pro power throttles, it can't be thermals. Perhaps background applications?

Notebookcheck: 147 points (100%)
Ars Technica: 134 points (91%)

Apple toys with the competition - MacBook Neo offers more single-core performance than any mobile processor from AMD, Intel or Qualcomm - NotebookCheck.net News

Now the A18 Pro is faster the 285K, too.

 

[NetMage]

Of course they did. I JUST bought a 266k for my wife.

A 265K? I did as well, but purchased in December to beat the coming (at that time) likely tariff roller coaster, and managed to sneak in before the RAM shortage as well.