Intel has a pair of recent flagship CPUs coming to quite a lot of expensive gaming laptops: the Core Extremely 9 290 HX Plus and Core Extremely 7 270HX Plus. The Arrow Lake Refresh chips sport 24 cores / 24 threads and 20 cores / 20 threads, respectively. Like Intel’s just lately introduced desktop CPUs, the brand new Plus fashions for laptops are “pushed additional for lovers,” and likewise function the Intel Binary Optimization Instrument that may enhance native efficiency “in choose video games.”
Intel’s Josh Newman states that the brand new chips “ship significant, actual‑world efficiency beneficial properties so customers can expertise smoother gameplay, sooner creation workflows, and extra responsive workstation efficiency.”
There aren’t a ton of particulars to this point in Intel’s reference supplies (just like the efficiency of the 270HX Plus) however with what Intel claims is an 8 % improve in gaming efficiency, it’s solely a modest acquire for the flagship 290HX Plus over the last-gen Core Extremely 9 285HX. For somebody with a four-year-old processor just like the “Alder Lake” Core i9-12900HX (16 cores / 24 threads), Intel claims a 62 % uplift in 1080p gaming on excessive settings.
It’s the same story with artistic apps: Intel’s slide deck and charts declare the 290HX Plus scores 7 % increased than the 285HX on Cinebench 2026 single thread efficiency, and 30 % increased than the i9-12900HX.
Intel doesn’t have any equal checks or claims for the Core Extremely 7 270HX Plus.
The 290HX Plus charts present take a look at outcomes on an MSI Titan 18, a gaming laptop computer costing almost $6,000. I reviewed the Titan 18 with Intel’s 285HX chip and an RTX 5090 Laptop computer GPU, and it was a formidable (if additionally gigantic and outlandishly costly) laptop computer for 4K gaming.
The brand new Arrow Lake Refresh chips may also have “as much as 900MHz increase to the die-to-die frequency” for lowering system latency by rising the pace of the CPU / reminiscence controller hyperlink. There’s no phrase on when new laptops with the 290HX Plus and 270HX Plus chips will launch, however Intel defers to OEMs like Asus, Acer, MSI Alienware, Lenovo, HP, and Razer to launch new fashions quickly.
