Intel’s gaming laptop chip selection might be about to get very confusing for customers. That’s because the company has just announced several new Intel Core 200H chips via its website, and their specs and recent leaks suggest they use the company’s aging Raptor Lake architecture, rather than its latest Arrow Lake designs.
If this is the case, the reasoning would seem to be Intel addressing the relative lack of gaming performance from its Arrow Lake-based gaming CPUs. Plenty of the best gaming laptop designs are switching to Arrow Lake, but for top-tier performance, its Raptor Lake designs are still faster.
This is still speculation for now, but the evidence is mounting. A few months back, an Intel Core 250H leak showed that this new chip was appearing as using the Raptor Lake architecture when tested using the Geekbench benchmarking software. Back then, though, that was still an as-yet unofficial chip.
Now, Intel has revealed a whole stack of new Intel Core 200H chips, and although the listing on Intel’s website – which was spotted by X (formerly Twitter) account @momomo_us – doesn’t explicitly say they’re Raptor Lake CPUs, a look at their specs strongly hints that this is the case.
That’s because each chip is shown as having differing numbers of CPU cores to the number of processing threads. With Arrow Lake having switched to an architecture where each core can only process one thread at once, this mismatch suggests a return to Raptor Lake, as that architecture allowed for two threads to be processed at once on each of the P-Cores.
So, for instance, the flagship product of this new range appears to be the Intel Core 9 270H, with this chip is listed as running at up to 5.8GHz and having a total of 14 cores. That total comprises six performance cores (P-Cores) and 8 efficiency cores (E-Cores). The number of threads it can manage at once is then listed as 20, which would correspond with the P-Cores handling two threads each (12 total) and the E-Cores handling eight threads, for a combined total of 20.
Thankfully, while this possible renaming of old chips under a new style to match current CPU names definitely has the potential to be confusing, Intel has left us one clear indicator to differentiate these chips. Where its modern Arrow Lake chips – with their dedicated AI cores, incredible power efficiency, and more powerful integrated graphics – come under the Intel Core Ultra 200 banner, these new chips are simply Intel Core 200 chips.
Intel’s Raptor Lake architecture has been the basis of a wide range of Intel CPUs since 2022, with the company’s 13th and 14th-gen Intel Core i-series CPUs being based on it. While powerful, and possessing the ability to crank up to very high clock speeds, these chips were notorious for being not particularly power efficient, with desktop variants drawing hundreds of watts of power at times.
What’s more, the architecture particularly took a bashing when it emerged that some 14th-generation desktop CPUs could damage themselves from running at too high a voltage. It took Intel months to acknowledge and then fix the issue, with it finally issuing a 14th gen CPU fix a couple of months ago. We can only assume that Intel is confident those problems are firmly behind it with these new chips.
Precisely what these new Intel Core 200 laptop CPUs will bring in terms of real-world performance and features, we shall no doubt find out soon. Largely, though, we would expect them to perform similarly to current-gen Intel Core i-series laptops, as we tested in our Razer Blade 16 review and our MSI Titan 18 HX review, with these chips still dominating the top tier of gaming laptop performance. For now, you can read more about what Intel’s latest very CPU architecture has brought to the table in our Arrow Lake guide.
