Intel bets on efficiency with the power-sipping Core Ultra 200S series

rockpapershotgun.com:

Intel have announced their latest batch of desktop CPUs, the Core Ultra 200S series, and it's got the component giants singing quite a different tune. Instead of trying to stuff in ever more threads, and ever more PC-incinerating clock speeds, the Core Ultra 200S family – spearheaded by the Core Ultra 9 285K when it launches later this year – will dial back certain specs compared the 14th Gen range. Instead, the focus will be on power efficiency and lowering temperatures.

That’s not to say this generation will actively trundle backwards on performance. Intel claim that the Core Ultra 200S’ new P-core and E-core designs have improved IPC (instructions per clock, or basically how much work the core can perform in each clock cycle) by 9% and 32% respectively. And the Core Ultra 9 285K, which replaces the Core i9-14900K, is said to be a in "dead heat" with AMD’s top-spec Ryzen 9 9950X when averaging out all their gaming benchmark differences.

However, this new chip also cuts its thread count to 24 (matching its physical core count but down on the i9-14900K’s 24 core/32 thread setup), while also stepping away from the i9-14900K’s maximum 6GHz clock speed to top out at 5.7GHz instead. It’s a similar story down the rest of the range, too: the Core 5 245K, successor to the more mainstream Core i5-14600K, drops from 20 threads to 14, and from a 5.3GHz max clock speed to 5.2GHz.

A concession that infinite growth is futile, and that gaming CPUs, like their owners, will ultimately decay into insignificant cosmic dust? Not quite. It’s all in aid of better efficiency, y’see, and the Core Ultra 200S range is very much designed to be Intel’s least power-hungry chip generation in years, with total package power down by 40% in some cases. And while it might not get far better framerates out of your graphics card than the 14th Gen crew, if it can at least avoid running slower, that could work out to a tremendous improvement in performance-per-watt.

During a pre-reveal presentation,