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.
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.
