They launch Intel Core Ultra 200S series desktop chipsets with dedicated NPU

Intel The Core Ultra 200S series of desktop processors, codenamed Arrow Lake, was released by the company on Thursday. It’s the chip maker’s first desktop offering with a dedicated Neural Processing Unit (NPU). With a claimed performance of 36 trillion operations per second (TOPS), these will also be Intel’s first chipsets to power AI computers. Apart from the improved performance through the NPU, the company also said that the CPU and GPU have also received significant improvements. Intel Core Ultra 200S processors will be available in retail and online stores, as well as through OEM partner systems, starting October 24.

Intel Core Ultra 200S series processors are released

In a press release, the tech giant describes 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 them feature up to eight efficient cores (P-cores) and up to 16 efficient cores (E-cores). The company claims the new computing architecture offers up to 6 percent faster single-threaded performance and 14 percent faster performance on multi-threaded workloads compared to the previous generation. The processors also have a built-in Iris Xe GPU.

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

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

For connectivity, 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. In addition, they also support two integrated Thunderbolt 4 ports, Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3.