Intel adds Arrow Lake 'Plus' mobile chips with 8% gaming boost

Intel has added mobile versions to its refreshed Arrow Lake Plus family, introducing the Core Ultra 200HX Plus chips with an advertised 8% boost in gaming performance. The Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus retains the same eight Performance and 16 Efficient cores as the Core Ultra 9 285HX and keeps a 5.5 GHz maximum clock speed.

The performance uplift arrives without changes to core counts or clock speeds and is aided by Intel’s new BOT, a software layer that optimises application code on the fly to improve IPC. BOT is exclusive to the Plus chips for now, and it is unclear whether it will be released for existing Arrow Lake processors.

Intel compared 32 games at 1080p High settings between the 290HX Plus and the 285HX. About a third of those titles had BOT enabled; of the 10 games with the biggest gains, nine ran with BOT and saw uplifts between 10% and 24%. A few games showed little change with the new chip, possibly because they are GPU-limited.

intel, arrow lake, core ultra, 290hx, 285hx, bot, ipc, gaming performance, 5.5 ghz, 1080p