Intel's all about listening and change now, and it's given us the best CPUs in a long time

Nick Evanson, Hardware writer

(Image credit: Future)

This month I have been: mostly testing Intel’s new Arrow Lake Refresh chips, but I’ve also been checking out Nvidia’s new Dynamic Multi Frame Generation. I’ve been despondently staring at DRAM prices in the vain hope that I’ll stumble across an affordable 64 GB kit to update my video editing rig.

As with any new piece of PC technology, months of leaks and rumours ensured that Intel’s launch of its Core Ultra 200S processors wasn’t especially surprising. More cores, higher clock speeds, and lower price tags. But once I put the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and Ultra 5 250K Plus chips through our battery of benchmarks, I honestly couldn’t believe how good they were, especially in light of them being refreshes of CPUs that had so disappointed me back in October 2024.

Time has a funny way of changing one’s memories, but I can certainly recall Intel’s staff coming across somewhat hesitant. Responses to questions were a little guarded, and when we all finally got our hands on the CPUs for testing, it all became very clear: Other than for a few specific applications, Arrow Lake was merely ‘okay’ and AMD’s Zen 5 Ryzen chips were still going to be the number one choice for any PC user.

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Fast forward 16 months, and it was a rather different Robert Hallock, vice president and general manager at Intel, who fielded my questions about the new chip designs. Joined by Erin Maiorino (director of CPU technical marketing) and Thomas Hannaford (desktop/workstation communications), the trio were cheery and chatty, and perhaps more importantly, confident.

Given that the 250K Plus, at just $199, runs amok in so many benchmarks (to the point that it’s now our top recommendation for best mid-range CPU), such assurance is understandable. The 270K Plus, only $100 more expensive than the 250K Plus, is one of the most potent desktop CPUs Intel has made in a long time. However, there was more to it than just ‘Yeah, we’re happy because our new chips are really good.’

Intel’s best desktop processors in years (Image credit: Future)

Hallock pointed out that much has changed at Intel, from staffing to internal structures, and new ways of doing things; he often remarked about how much the nearly 60-year-old company was “listening to customers”.

It’s not just the Arrow Lake refresh that’s really good, as the Core Ultra 300 series (Panther Lake) is a great processor for laptops and would be superb in a little handheld gaming PC. I say ‘would’ simply because the global memory crisis has pretty much put paid to any hopes of seeing a Panther Lake-powered handheld, because it needs fast LPDDR5X DRAM to properly shine, and that stuff is super expensive now.

I’ve also been somewhat unfair to the first iteration of Arrow Lake, because thanks to a whole host of microcode, BIOS, driver, and operating system updates, they run an awful lot better than they first did. For outright gaming, you’re still going to be choosing an AMD X3D processor, and likewise stick with Team Red for an ultra-budget chip (i.e. the $83 Ryzen 5 5500) or a workstation ultra-threaded processor, but for everything else, Intel’s offerings are solid choices.

With Panther Lake, updated Arrow Lake, and the 200S Plus duo, it does seem like Intel is indeed listening to what the consumer market wants: fast, broadly capable chips that don’t use too much power and don’t have an outrageous price tag. Intel’s even saying its future desktop PC sockets will last longer than just one or two generations of processors.

Let’s hope Nova Lake’s LGA 1954 socket lasts a lot longer than Arrow Lake’s… (Image credit: Future)

One important thing to consider is whether this is just a flash in the pan. Are the prices for the 270K and 250K Plus indicative of what to expect from Nova Lake when it rolls out later this year, or has Intel been happy to accept a lower profit margin for a short while, just to get a brief edge over AMD? Will I really be able to fit a 2029 Core Ultra 600S processor in a 2026 Z990 motherboard? Is it really listening and responding or just saying things that consumers and the market want to hear?

I suspect nobody outside of Intel has the actual answers to these questions, and as someone with a pretty poor track record of correctly predicting the future of PC tech, I’m hesitant to put my chips down (if you pardon the pun). But it does feel like this is a ‘new’ Intel. Not entirely new, of course, but for an enormous, multibillion-dollar company, with tens of thousands of employees around the world, it’s about as new as you’re going to get.

Over the decades, I’ve sat through countless press briefings, tech presentations, and architecture conferences, and the recent ones from Intel really do stand out. Naturally, such events should be vibrant, full of energy, and packed with promises and tech hype, but they don’t always come across that way (for example, AMD’s lacklustre launch of RDNA 3).

(Image credit: AMD)

Talk is cheap, of course, and a handful of punchy or lousy presentations ultimately don’t matter if the end product is rubbish or brilliant. Few PC enthusiasts aren’t really going to care what somebody said on a stage one afternoon, many moons ago, when they’re out shopping for a new processor or graphics card.

But they probably are going to remember, or at the very least, be influenced by reports of a company doing the right things. When it re-entered the discrete graphics card market in 2022, with its Alchemist-powered Arc range, Intel promised that it would have frequent driver updates and support. Despite having the tiniest of slices of that market, Intel has stuck to its word, though this hasn’t helped shift any more Arc cards, sadly.

Just as important, the chip giant is learning from past mistakes and directions. It’s only been a handful of years since we had the Intel that made Raptor Lake, a processor design with an overwhelming thirst for power and launched with some inherent operating and manufacturing flaws.

Raptor Lake: Immense performance, immense power consumption (Image credit: Future)

High-end desktop versions had a tendency to obliterate themselves in certain circumstances, and laptop variants were incredibly hard to keep cool. Now, we have desktop and mobile chips that sip away at power, sport excellent GPUs, and are highly versatile.

Somewhat obviously, Intel had to do this, though. With AMD constantly increasing its share of the x86 market and Arm processors making headway in the world of desktop PCs, sticking to the old ways of doing things simply wasn’t an option. But regardless of what’s really going on behind the scenes, at this moment in time, Intel’s making the right products at the right prices.

If we all shout ‘Yes! More of this, please!” and then, rather crucially, go out and buy the products, perhaps the new Intel will continue to listen for many more years to come.