Intel quietly slips out another Raptor Lake refresh with the Core 200-series mobile CPU lineup

There are two key denominations in Intel’s latest mobile processor lineup, Core and Core Ultra. The Core Ultra processors include new architectures such as Lunar Lake, Arrow Lake, and Meteor Lake. While Core chips contain an architecture we’ve extremely familiar with. Yep, it’s Raptor Lake, and there are more chips on the way.

The new Core 200H-series has just hit the Intel website. These new product listings give us all the information we could need about the new mobile processors, which will make up the mainstream of the laptop market.

The Core 200H-series chips include up to 14 Performance-cores (Raptor Cove) and 8 Efficient-cores (Gracemont). That’s more than what’s available in the socketed 100-series (up to 2 P-cores and 8 E-cores) but a match for the 100-series embedded processors (up to 6 P-cores and 8 E-cores).

The top 200H-series chip, the Core 9 270H, is rated to a significantly higher clock speed than any 100H-series chip at 5.8 GHz.

You can see some of the differences between the mobile (socketed) 200-series and 100-series chips in this table, spotted by momomo_us on X (via Videocardz).

So, why does the Core 200H-series exist? In some ways it’s set to be the replacement to some of the 14th Gen mobile processors. It’s tough to say exactly how laptop manufacturers will position the 200H-series but there are a few worthy replacements in the lineup. Take the Core 9 270H. This chip offers a decent improvement over the Core i5 14500HX, which the same number of cores but a much higher clock speed and a lower TDP.

The problem is the Series 2 chip is billed with a recommended customer price of $697, while the 14th Gen chip is $337. That doesn’t quite add up to me considering both use the same, now-outdated architecture.

What makes things more complicated is that these aren’t the only 200H-series processors we’re expecting to hit the market. The Core 200H-series Raptor Lake chips are here first, but Intel has already confirmed that Core Ultra 200H-series and 200HX-series chips are on the way next year. These are built around the newer Arrow Lake architecture, which is hybrid of its Meteor Lake (Series 1) and Lunar Lake (Series 2) chips.

If you find these codenames, architectures, and generations confusing, I dare say you wouldn’t be the only one. Intel has really made a meal of it. These latest launches are only going to confuse matters for customers.

Here’s a table of the most prevalent mobile series, to help clear things up:

There are actually more processors than those noted above, including the UL and HL embedded chips, but I’ve stuck to what you might feasible run into as someone looking to buy a gaming laptop.

Check your CPU spec before you head to the checkout—that’s what I’d recommend from here on out. We might see a few more mainstream laptops take advantage of these socketed Core chips than we have seen to date, as the 14th Gen is generally pushed out of the market. Nevertheless, we’re most likely to run into a Core Ultra 200H or 200HX chip inside a gaming laptop and those should be just fine for our frame rate requirements.

For a quick recap, Arrow Lake H/HX includes the same core architecture as Lunar Lake (Lion Cove and Skymont). They’ll include up to 8 P-cores and 16 E-cores. However, these chips skip over the new Xe2 GPU found in Lunar Lake and feature an older Xe GPU with some AI acceleration thrown in for good measure.

Stay tuned for CES 2025 at the start of January if you’re eyeing up a new gaming laptop. That’s when we’ll know more about the many models hitting the market.