Intel unleashes the next Ultra Core Mobile 200HX chips for gaming laptops

Intel launched at CES 2025 the new Ultra Core Mobile 200HX series aimed for gaming devices along with the 200H series for mainstream portables. The new 200 series of chips is really spread up to many categories that is pretty complicated to track even for the most avid Intel fans so we’ll focus on the top tier SoCs here.

Our Intel Core Ultra 200HX and H series processors are built for the next generation of creators and gamers. With breakthrough compute and graphics performance, efficiency and AI capabilities, these processors will push the entire laptop experience to new heights. Josh Newman, vice president of the Client Computing Group and general manager of Product Marketing and Management at Intel

The new Intel Core Ultra 200HX are meant to be paired with discrete GPUs

The Core Ultra 200HX series was designed for premium gaming laptops or desktop replacement portables, featuring the same design as the Arrow Lake Core Ultra 200S series. That means it shares the P and E cores architectures. However, they are smaller, to make them fit in a laptop enclosure.

Although they come packed with undisclosed integrated Intel GPUs, they will most likely be paired with discrete GPUs by the OEMs.

The top SoC in the series is Core Ultra 9 285HX, that is packed with a total of 24 cores (8 P cores and 16 E-cores) with a top frequency of 5.4 GHz for the P cores and 2.8 GHz for the E-cores. What is more interesting is that none of the 200HX or 200H series processors fill the Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC requirements of more than 40 TOPs for AI requirements. The NPUs in all these chips doesn’t go over 13.1 TOPs. However, who needs AI capabilities for gaming?

Intel mentions that the new HX series processors have a 5% increased single thread and 20% more multi-thread performance over the last gen Raptor Lake CPUs.

The 200HS series chips come with Thunderbolt 4, Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.1 support. The Thunderbolt 5 will come with a discrete GPU selection.

We should also mention that the Intel Core Ultra 200HX series processors will have up to 48 total PCIe lanes (including PCIe 4.0 and 5.0) for discrete GPUs and storage connections. Also, the new chips provide overclocking for P and E cores that provides flexibility for gaming configurations. All the new HX chips offer support for DDR5 6400 memory.

As with the 200HS series, they will feature Intel Arc graphics and up to 8 Intel X^e cores and Intel X^e Matrix Extensions (XMX) for AI acceleration. Intel says that the advancement translates to 22% better gaming performance compared with prior gen H-series processors.

The Core Ultra 200H series processors with integrated graphics will launch in early Q1, and the Core Ultra 200HX series systems with discrete graphics will follow in late Q1, after the discrete GPU launches.

Right now, Intel doesn’t really have a good reply for AMD’s new CPU offering, while Qualcomm has decided to cover the low end AI PC market with their latest SoCs.

What do you think about the latest Intel Ultra Core Mobile 200HX series chips? Let us know in the comments below.