Intel’s Core Ultra 200S desktop chips, codenamed “Arrow Lake,” first launched in late 2024, and they were the most significant updates to Intel’s desktop CPU lineup in years. But that didn’t mean they were always improvements over what came before: while they’re power-efficient and run cooler than older 13th- and 14th-generation Core CPUs, they sometimes struggled to match those older chips’ gaming performance. And for gaming systems in particular, they’ve always had to live in the shadow of AMD’s Ryzen 7000 and 9000-series X3D processors, chips with extra L3 cache that disproportionately benefits games.
Intel doesn’t have a next-generation upgrade available for desktops yet, but it is shoring up its desktop lineup with a pair of upgraded chips. The Core Ultra 200S Plus processors (also referred to as Arrow Lake Refresh, in some circles) add more processor cores, boost clock speeds, add support for faster memory, and speed up the internal communication between different parts of the processor. Collectively, Intel says these improvements will boost gaming performance by an average of 15 percent.
The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and 270KF Plus (a real mouthful, all of these names are getting to be) add four more efficiency cores compared to the Core Ultra 7 265K, bringing the total number of cores to 24 (8 P-cores and 16 E-cores). If you wanted that many CPU cores previously, you would have had to spring for a Core Ultra 9 chip. The Core Ultra 5 250K Plus and 250KF Plus also get four more E-cores than the 245K, bringing its total to 6 P-cores and 12 E-cores.
Aside from the 900 MHz increase to the internal communication bus between chiplets and official support for DDR5-7200, these are the same Arrow Lake chips Intel has been selling for a while. They still use the LGA 1851 CPU socket and motherboards with 800-series chipsets, and should work in current boards after a BIOS update. The K-series chips still come with a basic integrated GPU with four of Intel’s Xe Cores, plus a neural processing unit (NPU) capable of 13 trillion operations per second—well short of the 40 TOPS needed to qualify for Microsoft’s Copilot+ label.
The new CPUs will be available starting on March 26, and their new suggested pricing is right around the current street price for their predecessors. The 270K will cost $299, compared to a $399 launch MSRP and $280-ish street price for the 265K. The 250K will cost $199, compared to a $309 launch MSRP and $210-ish street price for the 245K.
Intel is also pushing a partial software solution to its lesser gaming performance: According to the company, the Intel Binary Optimization Tool is “a first-of-its-kind binary translation layer optimization capability that can improve native performance in select games.” Intel didn’t provide many details here, but the translation layer seems to be intended to improve performance for titles that were originally optimized for other x86 CPUs—this mostly means AMD chips, but could apply to older Intel architectures as well. Since AMD’s processors have been used in PlayStation and Xbox consoles for more than a decade, the translation layer could be particularly useful for improving the performance of console ports running on an Intel-based PC. The translation layer is an extension of Intel’s existing Application Optimization tool.
