Intel announces Arrow Lake 'Plus' desktop chips with more cores and clocks for less cash—and IPC-boosting 'BOT' tool

Much rumoured, perhaps not necessarily all that anticipated, Intel's refreshed Arrow Lake CPUs have finally arrived. We give you the new Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and Core Ultra 5 520K Plus. And you know what, they're not half bad, even if that's more than 50% down to attractive pricing. They also come with an intriguing new software optimisation tool that promises to further boost performance over existing Arrow Lake chips.

That's right, the refresh amounts to just two new "Plus" SKUs. But, actually, that's fine and the two models pretty much hit the main enthusiast sweet spots. Well, as far as any CPU based on Intel's Arrow Lake Architecture can.

The Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus gets the full eight Performance and 16 Efficient compliment of cores, despite the "Ultra 7" rather than "Ultra 9" segmenting. Indeed, by the specs, it loses out remarkably little to the existing top dog Arrow Lake model, the Core Ultra 9 285K.

That chip has the same core counts but only marginally higher clock speeds. The new 270K Plus and existing 285K share the same base clocks, while the 270K Plus maxes out at 5.5 GHz on its Performance cores to the 285K's 5.7 GHz. But here's the thing. The 270K Plus comes in at just $299, miles below the $550-ish the 285K currently goes for. In short, the 285K now looks fairly pointless.

As for the Core Ultra 5 520K Plus, we're talking six Performance and 12 Efficient cores. That means it has the same Performance core count as the existing Core Ultra 5 245K, but an extra four Efficient cores. It also boosts slightly higher to 5.3 GHz to the 245K's 5.2 GHz.

Again, the kicker is price. Intel is asking just $199 for the new 250K Plus, which is the same as what the 245K generally sells for right now. So, that's a bit more clockspeed and a four more E cores for nowt. Nice.

Actually, there's a bit more to it than that. Intel is claiming that the new chips have up to 900 MHz more D2D frequency. That's essentially the high-speed interface connecting the SoC tile and the Compute tile and it can have a signifiant impact on performance. Memory support is also bumped up from 6400 MT/s to 7200 MT/s for these new Plus chips.

Perhaps most intriguing is the new "Intel Binary Optimization Tool" or Intel BOT for short. Intel says it's, "a first-of-its-kind binary translation layer optimization capability that can improve native performance in select games."

At this point Intel isn't saying too much more. But my understanding based on the limited information released so far is that it's a software layer that optimises application code (including games) on the fly to improve IPC in these new chips. And, yeah, it seems like, at least at first, BOT will be exclusive to Arrow Lake Plus. Whether it will be released latter for existing Arrow Lake CPUs isn't clear. But my hunch is that Intel probably could do that, should it choose to.

While Intel has provided comparative performance numbers with AMD CPUs, notably they are limited to multimedia and synthetic tests. The gaming benchmark results Intel provided are pegged against existing Arrow Lake CPU models, not AMD chips.

So, for what it's worth, Intel is claiming the new Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is 15% faster on average for gaming versus the Core Ultra 7 265K, which also now looks essentially defunct. The New Core Ultra 5 250K Plus is said to be 13% faster than the old 245K. How much those figures are down to cores, clocks or, well, BOTs and D2D frequencies remains to be seen.

Of course, the snag to the price appeal of these new chips is building up the rest of a rig in the current climate. What with RAM pricing already into orbit, SSD prices just jettisoning the solid boosters and spooling up the liquid-fuelled second stage, not to mention graphics cards that have operated in frankly their own solar system for some time now, a well priced CPU is nice but arguably butters insufficient parsnips (stay with me...).

Anywho, at first viewing these new Arrow Lake Plus chips rates as a better-than-average CPU refresh, by Intel's standards at least. It will be interesting to see how they perform in the real world after they go on sale on March 26.