With the big Copilot+ push last year and Intel’s radically new Lunar Lake range, it’d be easy to assume Intel forgot about gaming laptops. CES 2025 proves the company didn’t.
Several months after the original Lunar Lake CPUs launched, which Intel calls Core Ultra 200V CPUs, the company is launching 200U, 200H, and 200HX processors. The latter two ranges are angled toward gaming laptops, with HX-series processors specifically targeting gaming laptops with a discrete graphics card. The flagship Core Ultra 9 285HX packs a total of 24 cores, and it can boost as high as 5.5GHz.
You can see the full range of HX processors above. As is the case with other Lunar Lake mobile chips and Intel’s Arrow Lake desktop CPUs, these new chips don’t support Hyper-Threading. Instead, the efficient (E) cores drive the majority of performance, with the performance (P) cores stepping in for heavy workloads that require high boost clock speeds. Intel says that these chips will show up in laptops with a discrete GPU starting in the first quarter of 2025, many of which we’ll likely see in Las Vegas at CES.
A step down the range, Intel has its H-series processors, which scale up to 16 cores and a maximum 5.4GHz boost clock speed on the Core Ultra 9 285H. These processors draw a bit more power than their V-series counterparts, and they aren’t a system-on-a-chip (SoC), allowing laptop makers to customize memory capacity. However, the H-series chips still come with Intel’s Battlemage graphics architecture under the hood.
These processors are also rolling out in laptops in the first quarter of the year, but they’re angled toward thin and light machines without a discrete graphics card. Intel’s H-series CPUs usually straddle the line between a high-end thin and light laptop and portable gaming machines.
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At the bottom of the stack are Intel’s new U-series CPUs, which it didn’t share specs for. U-series processors are focused on inexpensive, highly efficient laptops that trade performance for portability, either due to form factor or price. Intel didn’t share when it expects U-series processors to start showing up, but they’ll likely start rolling out after the HX-series and H-series options.
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