Intel Arrow Lake Core Ultra 200S Tested: Competitively Priced With Creator Performance (hothardware.com) 31
MojoKid writes: Intel has lifted the embargo on independent reviews of its new Core Ultra 200S series Arrow Lake-S processors, which mark a shift in its desktop CPU strategy with symmetrical core/thread counts (no Hyperthreading) and a dedicated 13 TOPS NPU. This series features a disaggregated tiled design for the first time in Intel's desktop chips, focusing on efficiency and power reduction. The Core Ultra 5 245, priced around $300, and the Ultra 9 285K at $589 deliver strong performance, particularly in creator workloads, competing well with AMD's Ryzen CPUs, while the Ultra 9 285K's price undercuts AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X significantly. While gaming performance shows slight regression in spots, the new chips are much more power-efficient than their predecessors. Overall, the platform offers leading-edge features, competitive pricing, and solid performance for creators, gamers and workstation pros.
It's a mess (Score:4, Insightful)
Just watch the GN review. Arrow Lake was not ready for release.
Intel Ultra 9 285K preliminary review -- Mixed bag (Score:2)
Here's an initial review by Techspot. It's no world beater at the price.
https://www.techspot.com/review/2911-intel-core-ultra-9-285k/
Slashvertisement (Score:5, Insightful)
Intel is in for some rough times. They need to please Wall Street with the massive layoffs and firings but that's going to cause all sorts of problems. They won't be able to keep up and it's not like those engineers are going to commit sepaku they're going to go work for competitors.
Intel and Nvidia both for years have been able to dominate the industry because they took their initial lead and used it to hire all the best engineers even if they didn't particularly need them in order to keep them away from their competitors. Intel's cuts are so deep they're firing some of those guys and they're going to walk themselves right over to AMD and get back to work.
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Is there ANY use case where buying a current or new Intel desktop CPU is the right choice instead of buying a Ryzen 9000 series (or waiting a bit for a Ryzen 9000 series X3D). Or for those on a budget, buying last-gen Ryzen instead of lower-end Intel.
And buying Intel makes even less sense when you factor in the 13th and 14th gen chips that failed and the fallout from that.
I myself have exclusively owned Intel chips all the way from a Pentium III 800 to my current Core i5-9400F but if I was buying a new CPU
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I guess if you're own stock in Intel...
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Buddy of mine's a musician and for the longest time you were stuck on Intel because of latency problems (again, due to vendor specific optimizations) with AMD but to my surprise those are issues are resolved.
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Hmm?
That's not what Phoronix is saying. It's much more mixed.
https://www.phoronix.com/revie... [phoronix.com]
If you actually dig in to the benchmarks, there are those where the AMD CPUs destroy the intel ones, and ones where the reverse is true. The differences are dramatic in some cases.
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You also need a more expensive motherboard, more expensive RAM, and Intel consumer CPUs don't support ECC.
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It's got to the case where they are close enough that if you care about performance you really should choose the CPU architecture based on the usecase.
There's something like a factor of 2 between the Intel and AMD CPUs in both directions depending on the task. Slightly cheaper CPU it seems, pricier motherboard, same RAM. You can get a small uplift in both cases depending on the benchmark going from 6400 to 8000, YMMV.
We're also talking top end CPUs here and there's a few hundred dollars in it tops for the o
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I'm wary of Intel hardware given how often it seems to get screwed up catastrophically. The only area it really interests me in is for low power always-on system. Ryzen is very good on laptops, but for desktop Intel still seems to have the edge. Get one that is a few years old and known to be reliable.
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Yeah. I'm more of an observer. I'm unlikely to stump for an Intel system right now, certainly not before decent support for the NPU exists. I have no experience with AMD laptops. My work laptop is Intel with an nvidia GPU.
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Interesting, what would you use the NPU for? I can't think of anything it's worth owning the silicon for.
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Interesting, what would you use the NPU for? I can't think of anything it's worth owning the silicon for.
Faster NN inference of course! And training if they do a really good job. 50% of my day job is ML at the moment. Plus if they are fast enough it may be a good alternative to the incredibly annoying Nvidia Jetsons for deployment.
Also libraries such as pytorch are pretty good at general purpose numerics, and can go a lot faster with judicious use of a GPU. An NPU should fit in there.
I fully expect them to
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Plus if they are fast enough it may be a good alternative to the incredibly annoying Nvidia Jetsons for deployment.
Knowing little and being honestly curious: Can you elaborate on what's so incredibly annoying about the Nvidia Jetsons? E.g. if someone wanted to integrate a Jetson SOM into a custom data acquisition board, what else (of comparable function/performance) would you recommend they use instead?
Thanks!
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Yeah there's a certain irony to that! Definitely for much of what I do, SIMD helps.
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The trouble with forum reviews is you might be comparing a guy with $20 ram and a $60 mobo to somebody with $300 ram and a $700 mobo. Folks will usually say what their hardware is, but unless you're really looking it's confusing.
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Every single reputable YouTube review and even some that aren't all that reputable said the same thing, AMDs equivalents are performing better for less money and with performance per watt.
Which is why they need to keep making up more and more niche categories to seem like they haven't released a dud. Most popular soda in the single mother and fireman aged between 32 and 34...
To be fair, people were saying AMD were done in the Phenom days, but have made a hell of a comeback with Ryzen.
That being said I've a laptop with a Ryzen CPU and it's battery life is terrible, bur I knew that going in and I didn't buy it for it's battery life, it's a cheap and powerful light gaming platform (it's a
You might say... (Score:2)
HotHardware.com: "These are the best free Intel processors we've received in the mail all week and we can find no fault because we like free stuff"
On the other hand, Gamers Nexus and Hardware Unboxed have found many of the faults and aren't afraid to report them.
The fine summary (Score:2)
Is it just me or does the summary read just like it was written by an LLM?
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It reads like it was written by an Intel shill.
Slower, hotter, costs more! (Score:2)
Sign me up!
I wonder how much Intel paid this ad.
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Lol, I got you so triggered you will follow me and post your dumb shit on anything I post.
#triggeredthenerd
Sigh. (Score:4, Interesting)
"Core Ultra 200S series Arrow Lake-S"
I miss the days where you could just number a processor and understand where it sat on the scale of performance.
"Creator performance" (Score:3)
What was most objectionable to me was the use of "creator performance" as some kind of application benchmark group. What is this imaginary "creator" using the computer for? Who knows, but it's creative!
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Ah, but they aren't creators, they are "creatives," an abuse of language that sets my teeth on edge every time I hear it. I take it as code for, "I don't know how to speak the language well, and can't think independently, so use weak-minded jargon to appear like I'm keeping up with everyone else."
Settle down. Language evolves. You wanna get pissed about language abuse, go after marketing assholes that just randomly make up words. Creatives is the "nounification" of the word creative, which can be a verb or adverb. We create nouns out of verbs all the time. Sometimes, just for the hell of it. Like, I know a large number of people that would Darwinate themselves, and a somewhat smaller percentage of people that I expect actually *WILL* find a way to Darwinate themselves. You could very well be among t
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Nope, for a while an Intel "xxxx" would always be better than an Intel "yyyy" so long as x > y.
You couldn't use them for comparison between Intel and AMD (though they tried to make you think you could), but still an AMD "xxxx" was better than an AMD "yyyy" in the same way.
Now, even as someone who manages thousands of machines, I stopped caring entirely because it could take me a week to evaluate all the current for-sale CPUs for even a single server mainboard for what value they'd give me, and I just buy