Intel have refreshed Arrow Lake-S with the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus and Core Ultra 7 270K Plus processors.  They remain completely compatible with the motherboards and memory used by the original chips, and sadly with the state of the market an effective refresh of an existing product is actually good news.   While we once would have mocked Intel or any other company for releasing the same product again, doing so with a boost in performance and a reduced cost is something worth enjoying,  The Core Ultra 5 250K Plus sports an MSRP of $199 and Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is even more attractive at $299.

These new processors are not going to displace AMD’s V-Core chips for pure gaming performance, but they do offer a ~15% performance jump compared to the original Arrow Lake-S chips.  That is decent news, but not amazing, however that is only one small slice of the pie.  These new chips show improvement across the board, providing better performance for your Office 359 applications, Cinebench and the other apps you use when you are being productive.  The increased core count and maximum frequencies really do help these chips when you are using them at your day job compared to the originals, and that should help Intel sell more of these processors.  It’s not exactly worth upgrading if you are already running an Arrow Lake-S system, but if you are a generation or two behind, there is suddenly a reason to consider Intel for your next multipurpose PC build.

It will also be interesting to see how the evolution of Intel’s Application Optimization with their DDT/APO/Binary Optimization Tools changes the performance of these chips.  As more applications become compatible with these optimization tools and as Intel improves them internally we may see the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus and Core Ultra 7 270K Plus pull even further ahead of their older siblings.  Check out Guru3D’s review and the others below the fold to get more details.

We will be posting our review of the new Arrow Lake-S chips very soon, as we raised the roughly $100,000,000 it costs to pick up 16GB of decent DDR5.