Intel needs a big swing—and a long ball—to reassert itself in the desktop processor world. Lo and behold: Its upcoming refreshed Core Ultra 200S chips, now with a “Plus” tacked on the end, might pack the lumber for the job—and surprise plenty of skeptics on price.
Refreshing the same “Arrow Lake” architectural design as the existing Core Ultra 200S line, the new Plus processors, according to Intel, will enjoy multithreaded performance boosted by up to 103% (take that with a grain of salt; that’s a new Core Ultra 5 Plus chip versus an AMD Ryzen 5 equivalent), and gaming speed ticked up by an average of 15%. PC gaming is where Intel needs to make up the most ground versus AMD, so this 15% bump is arguably the more important claim.
Still, that…