Seven tiles. That is what a tinkerer found when he pried the metal lid off a Core Ultra 9 285K and posted the photos on X, and it is the clearest picture yet of what changed inside Intel’s desktop processors. The Core Ultra 200S family, code-named Arrow Lake, went on sale on October 24, 2024, and for the first time Intel built a desktop chip from several small pieces instead of one big slab of silicon.
Laptop buyers had already seen the idea. Meteor Lake, at the end of 2023, brought the tiled layout to notebooks. AMD has done something similar on desktops since 2019 with Ryzen 3000, according to heise online. Arrow Lake is Intel’s turn.
What is inside the package
The compute tile holds the cores: eight performance and 16 efficiency. It measures around 115 mm² and comes from TSMC’s first 3-nanometer process, N3B, which heise calls likely the most expensive part of the chip. A separate SoC tile of a good 86 mm² carries the NPU, the PCIe root hub, the display engine and the memory controller. An I/O tile covers extra PCIe lanes, Wi-Fi and Thunderbolt, and a graphics tile with four Xe cores and 512 shaders sits beside them. Two blank silicon fillers keep the pressure even under the heatspreader.
Only one piece comes from Intel’s own factories: a 22-nanometer base tile that all the others sit on and link through. Everything else is made by TSMC.
The cores, and the price
Intel’s flagship has the same core count as the Core i9-14900K, but the new performance cores, built on the Lion Cove design, cannot run two threads at once. Threads fall from 32 to 24, and the top clock is 5.7 GHz against 6 GHz and more for the older chips. Intel nonetheless promised 8 percent more single-core speed and 15 percent more multi-core speed than the 14900K.
The chips need the new LGA1851 socket, so buyers also need a motherboard with a Series 800 chipset. The Core Ultra 9 285K costs 589 US dollars. The Core Ultra 7 265K and Core Ultra 5 245K sit between 300 and 400 dollars, roughly 60 euros above the models they replace.
Intel pitched the whole thing on efficiency. By its own figures, a gaming PC with the 285K and a GeForce RTX 4090 would draw about 165 watts less than one with the 14900K at the same frame rate.
How the first reviews landed
Notebookcheck described the launch as divisive. It leaned on 3DCenter, which gathered 20 launch reviews. In applications, the 285K came out 7% faster than the 14900K and 3% slower than AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X. In games it trailed the 14900K by 6% and the 9950X by 4.2%. The Ryzen 7 7800X3D was 16% faster.
Power was where Arrow Lake won. The 285K averaged 147 W in applications, against 198 W for the 14900K and 160 W for the 9950X. In games it used around 88 W, to 140 W for the 14900K and 111 W for the 9950X. A smaller step forward in speed, then, and a big one in power draw.
Sources
- Core Ultra 200S "Arrow Lake": Intel's new desktop CPUs launch on October 24 (heise online)
- Core Ultra 200S: This is what Intel's new desktop CPUs look like under the hood (heise online; same outlet as S1, counts together with it as one source)
- Intel Arrow Lake review analysis shows Core Ultra 200S CPUs are efficiency champs and gaming duds (Notebookcheck, Fawad Murtaza)
