Intel's Core 200 family poised to mix Arrow, Lunar, Meteor, Alder, and Raptor Lake parts — Arrow Lake-U CPUs rumored to offer Meteor Lake Refresh ported to Intel 3

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Core 200 chips could confuse customers.

Meteor Lake
(Image credit: Intel)

Some purported specifications of Intel's upcoming Core Ultra 200U or Arrow Lake-U mobile processors have been surfaced by Jaykihn at X. It turns out that despite the "Ultra" moniker; the Core Ultra 200U CPUs will utilize an updated version of the Meteor Lake architecture - reportedly using the Intel 3 node.

We double-checked and it turns out that Intel's naming scheme gets more confusing with each new launch. Arrow Lake-U is designated for thin and light laptops - with TDPs ranging between 12W, 15W, and 28W. The non-Ultra counterparts (Core 200U) are still based on Alder Lake silicon. These CPUs feature P-cores and E-cores using the Redwood Cove+ and Crestmont Enhanced microarchitectures respectively, in contrast to Lion Cove and Skymont on Arrow Lake chips. Meteor Lake or the Core Ultra 100 series was powered by the same architecture under the hood hence saying that Team Blue is porting Meteor Lake to Intel 3 isn't far off the mark. This is likely due to costs, as TSMC's N3B node doesn't come in cheap - but that's just speculation.

Going over the specifications, the Arrow Lake-U family leak describes four different flavors: Core Ultra 7 265U, Core Ultra 7 255U, Core Ultra 5 235U, and the Core Ultra 5 225U. The flagship 265U hosts 12 cores (two P + eight E + two LPE) and 14 threads alongside 12MB of L3 cache - boosting up to 5.3 GHz across one or two performance cores. The remaining three SKUs retain similar core counts, L3 cache, and Xe cores but see a drop in clock speeds, if this data is genuine and correct.

Core Ultra 200U CPUs

(Image credit: Jaykihn)

The leaker reports in the same thread that the iGPU (Integrated GPU) is based on Xe-LPG (Arc Alchemist) and not Xe-LPG+ (Alchemist+) like all other Arrow Lake processors; Arrow Lake-U thus probably reuses Meteor Lake's GPU Tile. Based on the specifications we can infer that all tiles except for the Compute Tile are similar to those featured in Meteor Lake. However, we'll wait for an official confirmation from Intel.

  • Core Ultra 200S - Arrow Lake Desktop
  • Core Ultra 200V - Lunar Lake
  • Core Ultra 200H/HX - Arrow Lake Mobile
  • Core Ultra 200U - Meteor Lake Refresh Mobile
  • Core 200U/H - Alder Lake / Raptor Lake Mobile

Such a change is potentially misleading, as customers might naturally assume that anything with the Core "Ultra" 200 tag slapped on it will be based on Arrow Lake but that's not the case here. It is probably fair to say that users should exercise great caution when purchasing a laptop next year as both Intel and AMD are constantly rolling out new chips under frequently changing naming schemes. Nonetheless, we expect these processors to be announced at CES 2025 alongside other Core Ultra 200H/HX/T/non-K processors.

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Hassam Nasir
Hassam Nasir
Contributing Writer

Hassam Nasir is a die-hard hardware enthusiast with years of experience as a tech editor and writer, focusing on detailed CPU comparisons and general hardware news. When he’s not working, you’ll find him bending tubes for his ever-evolving custom water-loop gaming rig or benchmarking the latest CPUs and GPUs just for fun.

12 Comments Comment from the forums
  • bit_user
    The article said:
    Such a change is potentially misleading, as customers might naturally assume that anything with the Core "Ultra" 200 tag slapped on it will be based on Arrow Lake but that's not the case here.
    That's what product marketing gets paid to do. At the end of the day, all they care about is selling product and maximizing margins. In fact, these kinds of weird switcheroos are probably where they consider themselves to add the most value to the organization. It doesn't take a genius to slap an honest and transparent label on products, but to cleverly disguise old products as new ones and fit them into the product lineup takes a bit of guile.

    Intel has been doing this for a long time (as has AMD, to be fair). Some products internally labelled as Raptor Lake and sold as Gen 13 or 14 are actually Alder Lake silicon. Going back even further, their laptop products would mix silicon in a single numeric generation, but I think the internal code names were distinct (e.g. Whiskey Lake were rebadged Kaby Lake dies, but at least they had a distinct code name).
    Reply
  • Notton
    IMO, this isn't as messy as what AMD does with their mobile lineup.
    It's pretty simple to figure out, in fact.

    Thin and light: 200V should be the only one you should consider.
    Gaming/Workstation: 200HX Ryzen AI HX 300, ditto.
    You are on a budget: 100 series, 11/12/13/14th gen
    Reply
  • usertests
    Arrow Lake-U is a tragedy, because Meteor Lake-U already cut back on the iGPU, with 4 Xe cores instead of 8. Alder/Raptor chips had up to 96 EUs in both the "H" and "U" variants.

    Then on top of that you aren't getting Skymont, which is a massive uplift over Crestmont.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    usertests said:
    Arrow Lake-U is a tragedy, because Meteor Lake-U already cut back on the iGPU, with 4 Xe cores instead of 8. Alder/Raptor chips had up to 96 EUs in both the "H" and "U" variants.
    It's a real shame they didn't just swap out the GPU tile, at least. I thought that was the main point of putting it on its own tile!

    usertests said:
    Then on top of that you aren't getting Skymont, which is a massive uplift over Crestmont.
    Yeah, the key aspect I leaped on was the fact of missing out on the goodness of Lion Cove and Skymont.
    Reply
  • DS426
    Enthusiasts would discern that difference but the typical buyer doesn't even know what those lakes are. Yes, generically, it's naturally for anyone to assume that the Ultra parts would have the very latest technology, but this isn't new and just isn't a safe assumption.

    Intel just wants prospects and customers to know that the Ultra parts are higher-end whereas non-Ultras are lower- to mid-end. They aren't failing on that marketing segmentation, so no surprise here for me at all.

    AMD was still putting in the older Vega iGPU's on newer APU's when RDNA1 and even RDNA2 was out. Interestingly, they jumped right from Vega to RDNA2 on all iGPU's of that time if I recall correctly. Moreover, we already know that AMD is going to continue putting RDNA2 into their APU's while also having RDNA3 and 3.5 ones all at the same time. Moreover, Zen 3, Zen 3+, 4, and 5 APU's are going to exist alongside each other. Not really a bad thing as anything Zen 3 and later are nothing short of incredible.
    Reply
  • User of Computers
    We knew this, but Jhaykin isn't really reliable
    Reply
  • User of Computers
    bit_user said:
    It's a real shame they didn't just swap out the GPU tile, at least. I thought that was the main point of putting it on its own tile!

    64 XE-HPG VEs are faster than 96 Xe-LP VEs. Remember that the HPG VEs are clocked significantly faster than the LP VEs.
    Reply
  • User of Computers
    usertests said:
    Arrow Lake-U is a tragedy, because Meteor Lake-U already cut back on the iGPU, with 4 Xe cores instead of 8. Alder/Raptor chips had up to 96 EUs in both the "H" and "U" variants.

    Then on top of that you aren't getting Skymont, which is a massive uplift over Crestmont.
    Honestly, it should be pretty darn good. Arrow Lake-U with the extra headroom afforded by Intel 3 should be a decent efficiency uplift over Meteor Lake-U.
    Reply
  • Mama Changa
    Well any one with half a brain that wants a U-class apu will get Lunar Lake full stop. Alas the unwashed masses will not know this and be pointed towards Meteor Lake Arrow Lake U rubbish.

    I will wait for Panther Lake if I want Intel mobile although Lunar Lake is actually quite decent. Maybe though Arrow Lake H based on Lion and Skymont will be good, but it doesn't get Xe2 graphics, only Xe+ IIRC. But if they can use the rumoured 128EU still might do well against 890M.
    Reply
  • subspruce
    Mama Changa said:
    Well any one with half a brain that wants a U-class apu will get Lunar Lake full stop. Alas the unwashed masses will not know this and be pointed towards Meteor Lake Arrow Lake U rubbish.

    I will wait for Panther Lake if I want Intel mobile although Lunar Lake is actually quite decent. Maybe though Arrow Lake H based on Lion and Skymont will be good, but it doesn't get Xe2 graphics, only Xe+ IIRC. But if they can use the rumoured 128EU still might do well against 890M.
    Lunar Lake won't be able to use LPCAMM2
    Reply