Intel launched new Intel Core Ultra 200S processors for AI PC desktops on Thursday with a focus on gamers, saying the chips will “usher in the first enthusiast desktop AI PCs.”
Whether all the ushering in happens is yet to be seen, but the announcement comes at a propitious time for the industry stalwart as it preps for its next earnings call on Halloween of all days, Oct. 31. At the last earnings call on Aug.1, Intel announced layoffs of 15,000 workers which are moving steadily ahead, according to insiders who have spoken to Fierce Electronics.
Intel announced 30 industry partners in the Core Ultra announcement, including all the desktop stalwarts such as Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP and Lenovo. Availability starts Oct. 24, Intel said. Pricing for the 24 core Ultra 9 285K in the Ultra 200S Series was announced at a suggested price of $589, with the lower end 14 core Ultra 5 245K at $309. Intel will sell them unlocked.
Intel also announced Core UItra H and HX Series will be arriving in first quarter 2025, its first ever mobile AI PC chips for gamers and creators.
Core Ultra 200S series is also known as Arrow Lake, which is Intel’s answer to make a gaming desktop-only chip with an NPU that has 13 TOPS (Tera Operations Per Second). Intel notes that its 200S series has an NPU, CPU and GPU, which together provide 36 TOPS.
By comparison, the Lunar Lake processor from Intel can run Microsoft Copilot, which requires a chip with an NPU with at least 40 TOPS as a benchmark. Lunar Lake has an NPU TOPS of 48, which compare to AMD’s equivalent of 50 and Qualcomm’s equivalent of 45. The Core Ultra 200S is not meant for notebooks and is classified as an “enthusiast” desktop PC chip for uses such as gaming, said Jay Chou, an analyst at IDC.
While Intel focused on gamers in its announcement, Chou said gaming is an important portion of the overall PC landscape but not Intel’s main focus. “A lot of AI use cases like Copilot are currently geared towards creative and business scenarios,” Chou said.
In 2024, the industry is just at the beginning of a transition into AI PCs while software and use cases “still need to be tried out,” he said. Chou noted that game desktops have been shrinking in market size because some gamers favor a gaming notebook for portability. However, “gaming desktops are still an important piece of the gaming landscape, especially to get max performance,” he said.
The new chip requires a new motherboard so some gaming vendors like ASUS will offer complete gaming PCs with Core Ultra 200S, Chou said, but some gamers will choose to build their own systems and will buy components part by part, including motherboard, chips and storage.
The real momentum to the AI PC movement is expected to build up in 2025 and later with a bigger AI PC ecosystem and new GPUs, as well as business PC refresh cycles in business settings to avoid Windows 10 end of support, Chou said.
Intel holds about 79% of the PC market, while AMD holds about 21%. Earlier this week, IDC reported shipments of traditional PCs had dipped 2.4% to 68.8 million units during the third quarter. Demand has returned after a long period of decline, but it is mostly concentrated at low-cost entry level PCs.
IDC said newer AI PCs with Copilot+ from Qualcomm and equivalents from Intel and AMD, along with M4-based Macs are expected to drive sales in the premium PC segment in coming months.
AI PCs will reach ubiquity at the end of the decade, IDC said. “The ramp up towards mass market with take longer than expected, well into 2026,” said Linn Huang, research vice president at IDC, in a statement.
Apple Macs saw the biggest decline in third quarter of all the major vendors, down 24% compared to a year earlier. Lenovo was the market leader, followed by HP, Dell, Asus and then Apple.
Analysts expect Nvidia to announce its first RTX 50 desktop GPUs based on Blackwell architecture in a keynote announcement by CEO Jensen Huang at CES in January.
