Intel processors have earned an infamous reputation thanks to their insatiable appetite for power. The company know this, and appears to be tackling the issue as a priority with its upcoming Arrow Lake CPUs. While there’s still much to learn about the architecture, we now know it’ll be much kinder to our electric bill.
As things currently stand, the best CPUs in the Intel arsenal guzzle over 300W under load. This is a monstrous amount of electricity relative to competing models from AMD. To make matters worse for the company, Ryzen 9 chips with Zen 5 cores will likely further highlight this drawback. Thankfully, Arrow Lake should be a welcome course correction, providing its lower power draw doesn’t drastically impact performance.
During an event co-hosted by Intel and Asus, the company allegedly shared some details about its Arrow Lake processors. More specifically, Core Ultra 200 series CPUs have “at least 100W lower power consumption while maintaining high frequencies.” This is according to a Chinese tech blogger, “小敌鸽” aka Little Pigeon, that attended the event (via Videocardz). However, their Weibo post is no longer available.
We sadly don’t know what comparison points Intel used to back up this claim. While this leaves firm conclusions off the table, we can make educated guestimates. Using the 300W figure from our Core i9-14900K review, we could see Core Ultra 9 285K run at around 200W peak.
Reassuringly, Intel apparently also claimed that Arrow Lake won’t suffer the same instabilities that plague Raptor Lake. This is the least it should promise, though, for the sake of its customers and its finances. The proof will of course be in the pudding… or, in this case, processor.
Intel didn’t share any specific performance points at the event, but did claim Arrow Lake is “impressive.” We’ve seen a mix of promising and disappointing leaks emerge ahead of the Core Ultra 200 series launch, but we’re expecting a bigger bang than Meteor Lake delivered.
The Arrow Lake release date should fall relatively soon, but AMD is enjoying a small launch lead over Intel with its Ryzen 9000 series. We’ll have our assessment of the Core Ultra 200 series in due course, but for now I’d give our Ryzen 7 9700X & Ryzen 5 9600X review a read.