The company on Thursday launched a series of Intel Core Ultra 200S desktop processors codenamed Arrow Lake. This is the chipmaker’s first desktop offering with a dedicated Neural Processing Unit (NPU). With an announced performance of 36 trillion operations per second (TOPS), these will also be Intel’s first chipsets to power AI computers. In addition to improved performance via the NPU, the company also stated that the CPU and GPU have also received significant upgrades. Intel Core Ultra 200S processors will be available in retail and online stores, as well as through OEM partner systems starting October 24th.

Launched Intel Core Ultra 200S series processors

In a press release, the tech giant detailed the latest processors. The Intel Core Ultra 200S processor family is led by the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K processor as well as five other desktop processors. All of these have up to eight efficient cores (P-cores) and up to 16 efficient cores (E-cores). The company claimed that the new PC architecture offers up to 6 percent faster single-threaded performance and 14 percent higher performance in multi-threaded workloads compared to the previous generation. The processors also have a built-in Iris Xe GPU.

Intel pointed out that Arrow Lake processors are focused on energy efficiency and offer up to 58 percent less package power when running everyday applications and up to 165 W less system power consumption during gaming.

Coming to the NPU, the dedicated system offers hardware-accelerated AI capabilities. Although the company did not reveal the architecture, it claimed that the processors offer up to 36 TOPS of performance. The chipmaker also claimed that the Core Ultra 200S series can offer up to 50 percent faster performance in AI-powered creator applications compared to competing processors.

For connectivity, the Intel Core Ultra 200S series desktop processors offer compatibility with up to 24 PCIe 4.0 lanes, up to eight SATA 3.0 ports and up to 10 USB 3.2 ports. Additionally, they also support two integrated Thunderbolt 4 ports, Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3.