Intel: New Core Ultra 270K Plus & 250K Plus demolish AMD Ryzen CPUs on Windows 11 25H2

Intel has come out guns blazing as it claims its latest Core Ultra 270K Plus and 250K Plus processors easily outdo AMD's equivalent parts.

Intel has had an eventful 2026 so far. Back in January at CES 2026, new Core Ultra 300 series CPUs were unveiled for laptops and notebooks.

On the opposite end of the consumer spectrum, new Xeon workstation processors were also added to the mix in early Feb with the new Xeon 600 series parts. These come with up to 86 performance cores (P-cores).

Following that, the company, earlier this month in March, launched the new Core 200 series for edge computing. These are also P-core only, with the flagship Core 9 273PQE packing 12 P-cores. Along with it, the Ultra 300 series was also delivered.

Now, Team Blue is all set to release its mainstream desktop CPUs in the form of Intel Core Ultra 200S Plus Series. For now at least, the company is launching two new SKUs, the Ultra 7 270K Plus and the Ultra 5 250K Plus. There will also be an F- variant of the latter where the integrated graphics will be disabled.

You might be wondering why Intel is using the same "200" series moniker like the previous Arrow Lake-S series but with a "Plus" at the end. That is because this is essentially a refresh of the 200 series, which was flagshipped by the Ultra 9 285K, and the Plus at the end is meant to signify that these SKUs have been pushed to their limits as they are meant for enthusiasts.

If you are wondering how far Intel pushed them, the company has said that both the 270K Plus and the 250K Plus have up to a 900 MHz die-to-die (D2D) frequency boost compared to the 265K and the 245K. Plus the 270K Plus has four more E-cores than the 265K, and likewise, the 250K Plus has four extra E-cores compared to the 245K.

Thanks to these extra cores and clock, Intel says it helps the new Ultra 200 Plus achieve up to a 15% faster gaming performance compared to the current 200 series. The more impressive part is that Intel says this makes it about twice as good as competing AMD Ryzen processors. On Windows 11 25H2, Intel says the 250K Plus is up to 103% better than the Ryzen 9600X, and the 270K Plus is up to 92% better than the Ryzen 9700X.

Perhaps the biggest improvement with the new 200 Plus chips is the memory controller. Intel says that the new processors are stable at DDR5-7200 MT/s, which is significantly up from the previous 6400 MT/s speed.

The more impressive announcement is the early support for 4-rank CUDIMM which means that the Intel 200 Plus series supports 128 GB of memory per module. If you install two of these modules, your system can have a total of 256 GB of DDR5-7200 RAM, ensuring high memory capacity and performance.

Intel is also launching a new Binary Optimization Tool with Arrow Lake-S refresh. Details on the new utility are low at this moment. Intel says that it is the "first-of-its-kind binary translation layer optimization capability that can improve native performance in select games."

Intel also adds that this new optimization tech helps in "workload optimization to increase processor instructions per cycle (IPC) and user performance, even if the workload has been optimized for another x86 processor, a game console, or an earlier architecture."

Finally, in terms of pricing, Intel has pegged the 270K Plus at $299 and the 250K Plus at $199 starting March 26. On paper, this looks like a good value product. We will see in our review how the new chips stack up against the AMD competition.

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Posted Thursday 12 March 2026 at 7:01 am AEST (my time).

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