Intel’s Core Ultra 200 laptop CPUs deliver shocking performance gains | usagoldmines.com

Intel’s Core 285H chip, the first member of its Core Ultra 200 or “Arrow Lake-H” family for laptops, has a big crater to fill. Yes, crater: This processor essentially bombed on the desktop. In laptops, however, Intel’s Core 285H chip helps redeem Intel’s reputation, starring in the otherwise pedestrian MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo (B2HMG) laptop.

Consider this to be two reviews for the price of one: I’ll take a look at the MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo itself, a sample of a laptop that has yet to begin officially shipping. But most of the performance tests I’ll run are for the purpose of comparing Intel’s Core Ultra 285H and the Arrow Lake-H architecture to the best that AMD and Qualcomm have to offer, plus Intel’s older mobile chips.

The short answer: Intel blows away its previous “Lunar Lake” chips, the Core Ultra 200V. The new Core Ultra 200H chips essentially double the performance in general applications thanks to a ton of additional cores. But, hampered by its lack of a modern NPU, Intel is forced to mumble and kick the ground when it comes to talking about AI.

At press time, I couldn’t find any retailers that advertised the Prestige 16 AI Evo (B2HMG) for sale, and MSI’s own listing for the laptop just references a number of overseas suppliers. MSI charges about $1,620 for the Prestige 16 AI EVO B1MG, which was the debut laptop for our tests of the Core Ultra 100-series chips, or Meteor Lake, in Feb. 2024.

MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo (B2HMG): Specs and features

• Display: 16-inch 3840×2400 OLED @60Hz
• Processor: “Up to” Core 7 200H, Core 9 285H as tested
• Graphics: Intel Arc 140T
• NPU: Yes, 13 TOPS
• Memory: 32GB LPDDR5x-7500
• Storage: 1TB (2x M.2 SSD slots, NVMe PCIe Gen 4)
• Ports: 2 USB-C (Thunderbolt 4, DisplayPort/Power Delivery 3.0); 1 HDMI 2.1, 1 USB-A 10Gbps, 1 SD (XC/HC card reader), Gigabit Ethernet, Kensington lock
• Camera: 1080p, 30 fps (user-facing)
• Battery: 99.9Wh
• Wireless: Intel Killer BE Wi-Fi 7/ Bluetooth 5.4
• Operating system: Windows 11 Home/Pro (Windows 11 Home as tested)
• Dimensions (inches): 14.11 x 10.02 x 0.75 in. (16.9-19.0mm)
• Weight: 3.31 lbs.
• Color: Stellar Gray
• Price: Unknown

MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo (B2HMG): Design, build quality, display and ports

Intel sent us an engineering sample of the MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo (B2HMG) for review, as a test bed for the Core Ultra 9 285H (Arrow Lake-H) chip inside.

You’re not going to find too many differences between the Prestige 16 AI Evo B2HMG and earlier models like the 2024 MSI Prestige 16 B1MG, which housed the Core Ultra 7 155H, Intel’s first entrant into its mobile Core Ultra family. As reviewer Matt Smith noted of the B1MG, this B2HMG is a thoroughly mainstream, rather nondescript, plasticky laptop most notable for what’s inside. It’s not a huge surprise that the model is used as a showcase for Intel’s new chips.

Structurally, the magnesium-aluminum laptop doesn’t quite have the robustness you’d expect from a purely aluminum chassis, though I really didn’t notice any keyboard flex. I didn’t notice any display flex either, although opening and closing the device feels a bit flimsy.

I wouldn’t mind if MSI shaved a few tenths of a pound off of the weight, but 3.3 pounds isn’t egregious for a mainstream laptop. I’ve stopped worrying about laptop thicknesses, mostly, but the chassis is thick enough to accommodate an Ethernet port, which is always a nice touch.

About the only thing that feels off to me are the rear-mounted ports. I know there’s an argument to be made that snaking the power cable (which takes up one of the two USB-C/Thunderbolt ports on the rear of the machine) from behind can save space. The same holds for placing the HDMI port on the rear. But it feels weird in my own setup, in which the laptop sits on my desk’s keyboard drawer, with its screen nestled just under a desktop display. I always worry about crimping the cords or bending the USB-C port itself.

Aside from the SD slot, Ethernet, and headphone jack on the right side of the chassis, the Prestige 16 AI Evo B2HMG uses the left side for venting hot air that’s pulled in from a grille underneath the laptop itself. I rarely heard the fans spin up to peak levels. Most of the time, if the laptop needed to cool itself, the fans ran at just a light hiss.

The fan response time seems quick as well; over the years I’ve simply expected the fans to ramp up and stay that way through benchmark tests. That wasn’t the case here, with the fans turning off and on as needed.

Maybe I’m jaded, but I’ve come to expect high-refresh rate displays. This laptop doesn’t have one — just the default 60Hz — which feels like a step down if you’ve used a faster one. Thankfully, MSI added an OLED display to the Prestige 16 AI Evo, which always adds a certain je ne sais quoi when watching movies, where OLED’s fantastic contrast helps the colors pop. I’m assuming you’ve used an OLED display before; if you haven’t, you’re in for a real treat.

There’s a tradeoff, however, and that’s the display resolution: 2560 x 1600.

As the numbers suggest, the display offers more pixels than a 1440p display, but falls short of a true 3840×2160 (4K) display. I couldn’t help but wonder why the earlier B1MG offered a gorgeous 3840×2400 display, and this didn’t. Pushing pixels does affect performance, however. (At the time of my review of Intel’s Core 100 chip, Intel and MSI sent me an engineering sample of the B1MG with the same 1600p display as in the B2HMG, and not the 2400p display that was part of our B1MG review.)

As always, some of the most useful functionality hides within the system utility software. MSI calls its app MSI Center, and it allows quick toggles between performance modes as well as access to features like the ability to cap charging at 80 percent to preserve battery life, what happens when the lid is closed, and so on. MSI doesn’t offer nearly as many capabilities as, say, Asus, but it’s still worth a tour to discover noise cancellation technologies and where to find firmware updates that aren’t covered by Windows Update itself.

Our engineering sample didn’t come with any bloatware besides Norton 365, which I had to remove because it interfered with my benchmark software.

There are a couple of other features worth noting: support for the very latest Wi-Fi 7, which may be faster than your own broadband connection, as well as a neat feature that uses the webcam to put the laptop into sleep mode when you walk away. The latter feature isn’t new, but not every vendor offers it.

MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo (B2HMG): Keyboard and trackpad

The MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo (B2HMG) offers a full keyboard plus a trackpad, which is always to be applauded for lefty gamers. A biometric login also hides behind the power button. Windows and Windows Hello prefer that you log in with a depth camera (and yes, there is one) so you might be unaware that it exists. I like logging in with my face, but shaving or just a bad hair day can sometimes mess it up. Set up both and chances are that you’ll never have to use a PIN as a backup again.

Everything about the MSI laptop experience is sort of meh, so it’s mildly delightful to discover that the Prestige’s keyboard is comfortable and a pleasure to type upon. The keys are springy, even if they feel a mite small. The number pad is a bit narrower than a full-sized external keyboard, but that’s just a minor nitpick. A row of function keys at the top of the keyboard doesn’t hide any surprises, and includes keys to cut off the mic and camera. (There is also a physical webcam shutter.)

There are three levels of backlighting, which can be configured to automatically turn off in 10 seconds via MSI Center. The default mode is “auto off,” which doesn’t really provide any additional explanation. It seems to rely on whether it detects you.

I honestly didn’t notice this feature before performing some battery longevity tests that put the laptop near me on occasion. The battery life of this laptop is still amazing, but my results varied by about 90 minutes. This could be why.

A massive (6×3.5 inches) trackpad at the bottom of the laptop, and slightly offset, is clickable nearly to the top. It doesn’t use haptics, as some laptops now do, to simulate the typing experience.

MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo (B2HMG): Webcam, speakers, and biometrics

The combination of the fingerprint reader behind the power button and the additional Windows Hello webcam feels like a nice one-two punch of biometric redundancy. Fingerprint sensors can accumulate grime, and biometric cameras don’t always tolerate changes in your appearance. But MSI’s approach worked well during my limited review period.

The webcam is pretty lousy. I’d wager that MSI built in a 1080p, 30fps webcam, then tacked Microsoft’s Windows Studio Effects on top of it. One of the features is the ability to do “pan and zoom,” so that the webcam follows your face as it moves around. In reality, the webcam is simply cropping in to find your face, which discards some of the 1080p pixels. In essence, you’re taking a 1080p webcam and cropping down to something akin to a 720p webcam instead.

My face ended up washed out and fuzzy (no beard jokes, please) when down in my office, and not much better upstairs in more natural light. I review the best webcams for laptops specifically for laptops like this.

You can slide the webcam shutter closed with a physical mechanism near the camera module itself.

One of the most underrated AI features on laptops is their ability to filter out and enhance audio, via a combination of multiple microphones, the laptop’s spatial awareness of them and what they can capture, and various AI enhancements. Again, this feature hides inside the MSI Center app, and specifically the AI Zone tab.

Turning on the “Studio EQ” makes an enormous difference in how your voice sounds, giving it warmth and some timbre, like a professional mic. Enabling the related “Conference Enhancer” audio mode and the “Front” (precise) mode captured my voice well, and absolutely erased the tapping and rattling of a spoon in a bowl just a foot or so to my right. Absolutely spectacular stuff.

It’s rather disappointing, then, that the speakers are soft and mushy. Yes, there’s AI filtering here as well, but MSI needs to beef up the basics.

What you need to know about the Core 200H (Arrow Lake-H)

Normally, our laptop reviews focus on a few key benchmarks. But since this is the first chance PCWorld has had to test these new Arrow Lake-H mobile processors, I’m going to devote more space than I normally would to a number of tests.

First, a brief recap. Intel announced both the Arrow Lake-H and Arrow Lake-HX processor families at CES in January. The Core Ultra 9 285H is the fastest chip in Intel’s mobile H-series chip at the moment, topping out at 2.90GHz.

The Arrow Lake-H family combines “next-gen” Lion Cove performance cores and Skymont efficiency cores, found in Lunar Lake, but with an addition: the ultra-low-power E-cores found in the Meteor Lake architecture. Within the Core Ultra 9 285H, they line up in a 6-8-2 configuration, with 6 performance cores, 8 efficiency cores, and a pair of the low-power E-cores. The chip also includes the second-gen Arc GPU core found within the Arrow Lake desktop processor, whose NPU only provides 13 TOPS of AI power. The MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo may have AI in its name, but it is not a Copilot+-class PC.

Intel has positioned the Arrow Lake-H family as “tweener” chip, powering a middle category between Lunar Lake’s long battery life and the gaming power of the Core HX family, which is due by the end of March. It’s a little weird that Intel’s Core Ultra 7 258V (Lunar Lake) and Core Ultra 9 285H (Arrow Lake) are two completely different chip architectures with similar model numbers, but that’s a problem for Intel’s marketing department to solve.

In this review, we’re using for comparison Intel’s Core 100 (Meteor Lake) and Core 200V (Lunar Lake) chips, represented by the $1,649 MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo and the $1,499 Asus Zenbook S 14, respectively. I’m also including another $1,699 Asus Zenbook S 16 with a Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 chip inside, as well as a second version with an AI 9 365 chip. I’ve let the $1,999 Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 represent the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite, with the $1,199 Microsoft Surface Pro 11th Edition dropping in where it can.

Let’s be honest: Arrow Lake was essentially a disaster on the desktop. Intel promised “parity” performance on the desktop at half the power, but failed to deliver. The Arrow Lake-S desktop chips needed a battery of patches and firmware updates to restore the expected performance, up to an additional 25 percent in some cases. (Those are all accounted for on the mobile platform, Intel says.) Will the increased emphasis on lower power play better in the laptop space? We’ll see.

For this review, I’ve focused testing on the three key segments of the Core Ultra 9 285H: the CPU, GPU, and NPU, comparing Intel’s latest to the representative samples of Intel’s prior Core Ultra 100 (Meteor Lake) and Core Ultra 200 (Lunar Lake) chips, as well as AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite processors.

I’ve run the tests both on wall power and on battery, as in some cases the performance can drop fairly significantly. Though I leave the laptops on their default power settings, I also ran our test laptop at the “Best Performance” setting just to see if it made any difference. Those are noted by the “MAX” label in the the tests below. MSI’s laptop also has an optional “AI Engine” that’s tucked away in its MSI Center utility, bundled with the laptop. I received it with that option turned off; I left it off. I’d expect that turning it on would put the performance somewhere between the default settings and the maximum performance option, both of which I’ve tested.

The results, unfortunately, are a bit patchy. Because of my colleague Gordon Mah Ung’s untimely death, a small number of tests weren’t completed on the Asus Zenbook S 16 and its Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 chip that he had in his possession. Rather than intrude on the family, we asked AMD for a replacement.

AMD representatives accidentally sent over a laptop with a slightly slower AI 9 365 chip inside instead. Though the names are similar, the AI HX 370 has 12 cores (4 Zen 5, 8 Zen 5c) and runs at up to 5.1GHz; the AI 9 365 includes 10 cores (4 Zen 5, and 6 Zen 5c) and runs at 5GHz. We’ve tested both, and our results appear below.

Some of the early AI tests don’t really accommodate the range of the new Ryzen’s capabilities, so you’ll notice some gaps there, however. Finally, it appears that a recent update to Adobe Photoshop may have broken the Pugetbench benchmark, a test I wanted to use to show off how well the chip runs Photoshop. The benchmark wouldn’t run.

Intel Core 200H: CPU benchmarks

The traditional metrics of CPU testing are Cinebench and Geekbench, which push the CPU to its limits in a prolonged burst. With gobs of cores, the Core Ultra 9 285H inside the MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo (B2HMG) helps it kick butt in the all-cores, all-threads tests — more than doubling the performance from Lunar Lake!

Cinebench R23 and Cinebench 2024 are variations on the same test, with the latter version ramping up its intensity to challenge the more advanced chips. These two tests essentially render a 2D scene, using the codebase that underlies the Maxon Cinema 4D visual FX application. Geekbench performs a number of similar stress tests upon the CPU, but does a lot more behind the scenes.

Though the multicore scores show a clear win for Intel’s Arrow Lake-H and the Core Ultra 9 285H, the single-core scores are much closer. Here, I have to note that the power settings make a difference. Again, I leave the power settings at the default levels, and the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 scores 849 in my multicore Cinebench 2024 tests. Gordon’s earlier tests of the chip dialed up the power settings across the board, where the Ryzen scored a 982.

AMD, Qualcomm, and Intel are much closer in single-core performance… but again, it’s a clear win for Intel in this round.

You’ll notice in a few cases that the “maximum” power setting actually underperforms the standard setting. We also occasionally see cases where the performance on battery even outperforms the chip on wall power. We’ve seen these sorts of anomalies for a few generations now; they’re rare, but they do happen.

Geekbench tests the CPU as well as the GPU, so there’s a bit of foreshadowing in the purple bars of the GPU testing here.

UL’s PCMark 10 is actually one of my favorite benchmarks, as it encompasses everything from video to CAD work to office testing. The problem is that Windows on Arm machines powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon trip and fall over one of the tests, invalidating the whole run. A similar test using the UL’s Procyon suite asks the laptop to perform various work tasks specifically designed around four Microsoft Office/Microsoft 365 applications: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook.

Procyon’s office benchmark might not be too intensive, but it’s also a real-world signal of how this laptop and the Core Ultra 200H chip will perform. What interests me about this test is that it uses all real-world application, but performance still drops off sharply on battery — more than other tests I ran.

Handbrake is a transcoding application, with a real-world, practical punch. In my previous testing of the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite, I downloaded a recent version to give the chip a fair chance to compete, and I’ve done the same with the Core Ultra 200H. (Previously we’ve used an older, unoptimized version for consistency.)

Handbrake offers tons of configuration settings. For this test, I used a quick, standardized preset and re-ran our previous results on the new settings. Here, a lower score is better, as it indicates the task completed faster. Again, the Core Ultra 200H wins, but not by that much over the Ryzen. (I’m pretty confident that the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 would have taken this test, but I didn’t have the laptop to prove it.)

Again, I would have liked to have tested Pugetbench’s standardized Photoshop test, but it wouldn’t run.

Intel Core 200H: GPU and gaming benchmarks

Intel has never positioned the Core Ultra 200H platform as a gaming PC, but Intel and its competitors are offering powerful enough integrated graphics that potentially offer the capability to play some older games at low settings. AMD, especially, offers a strong competitor with its integrated 980M GPUs. Does the Arrow Lake-H have enough to keep up?

We test graphics using simulated benchmarks: UL’s 3DMark suite. The Time Spy test maintains consistency with our established database of historical benchmarks, while the more advanced Steel Nomad Light test is designed for more modern PCs.

This is a competitive benchmark, with all three chip vendors performing well here. I’m also impressed that the performance doesn’t drop much when the laptops are disconnected from wall power and run on battery.

Still, games are the real test. The popular game Cyberpunk: 2077 scales well across the board, and it’s a good test of everything from frame generation to ray tracing. In this case, Intel has said that XeSS 2.0, which injects AI frames to smooth frame rates, was “backported” to the Core 200H’s GPU. But while more than 150 games reportedly support XeSS 1.0, only Marvel Rivals and F1 2024 currently support XeSS 2.0. That limits the chip’s appeal somewhat. (Though F1 has a “benchmark mode,” it simply tracks the frame rate on an on-screen counter, which makes it tough to gauge.)

Although Intel recommends that you try out gaming on the chip at Medium settings, we stuck with Low settings to eke out the best frame rate. After watching the benchmark for Cyberpunk, I’d consider the 40-ish frames per second not too bad, even though my preferred gaming setup can reach much higher. Most gamers prefer at least 60fps for smooth gaming, and the laptop doesn’t quite hit that, even at maximum power. AMD’s Ryzen is the king here.

The same thing occurred with the other game in our test bench, Shadow of the Tomb Raider. On Low settings it came closer to our target of 60fps, but didn’t achieve it. Just out of curiosity, I tried the Highest graphics setting and achieved just 33 frames per second.

I don’t think that you can call the MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo (B2HMG) quite capable of gaming by itself.

Intel Core Ultra 200H: AI benchmarks

AI benchmarking is still in a nascent stage. Chip vendors like Intel are hoping for a day when you’ll run local AI applications like AI art and LLM/AI chatbots directly on your PC, and that day is indeed here. However, the quality of the AI output is still heavily dependent on whether your laptop has a powerful graphics card, or a more efficient NPU; and whether the models being used are small enough to fit on a PC. You’ll also need to ensure that the application is coded for your chip’s architecture.

That last point is the snare that’s still hampering both Qualcomm and AMD. Although more applications are supporting both chip architectures — Microsoft has developed Copilot+ applications almost exclusively with Snapdragon chips in mind — Intel has leaned hard into capturing AI developers.

What this means is that many of the standardized tests either don’t run on AMD or Qualcomm chips, or else don’t take full advantage. On the other hand, some of the apps tap into both the GPU and the NPU on Intel’s processors, a future that Intel has eagerly anticipated. The bottom line is that it’s not easy to find a test that will put all three chip architectures on a level playing field, if the app supports all three chip architectures in the first place. These tests basically just compare generation-over-generation performance with Intel’s own chips.

In these tests, I turned on support for each processor where I could. Intel, for example, ran using in a dedicated OpenVINO mode, while Qualcomm used SNPE. AMD’s Ryzen AI only had a NPU available, and it reported that the dedicated NPU driver wasn’t loaded. But that didn’t seem to matter, given its score.

Remember, Arrow Lake-H is not a Copilot+ chip, and when you can find an application like UL’s Procyon Vision (which looks at how well a laptop processor can inference, or do work on, various machine learning models) Intel doesn’t come out on top.

Procyon Image Generation offers image models of different complexities. Here, the laptop is actually creating eight 512×512 images using an 8-bit integer model. (Higher complexity, such as a FP16 model, takes longer but produces better images.) Here, each image takes about 20 seconds to produce.

Lunar Lake is dominant here, with its GPU and NPU working together. Since the option to have both work together was there, I turned it on; it felt more realistic. The AMD and Qualcomm chips didn’t run.

You’re probably familiar with Google Gemini or Microsoft Copilot or ChatGPT; all are what’s known as LLMs, or large language models. Chip vendors hope that you’ll eventually use a compressed, less complex Small Language Model, or SLM, on your own machine.

MLCommons developed its own test, using the Llama 2 7B large language model (LLM) from Meta. The test downloads the model and then asks it to perform content generation, creative writing, and two summarization tests. This test doesn’t bother with a score. Instead, it looks at two key, real-world metrics: the time to first token (or how long the AI takes to respond to your query), and the number of tokens per second.

If you’re unfamiliar with AI, a “token” is the key unit of measurement. A token is a little less than a word: “some” requires a token, as does “2” or “6”. “Something” would require two tokens, as it’s essentially a compound word. When an AI chatbot responds to a query, it spits out text like a dot-matrix printer: You can see the words crawl across the screen on a locally running LLM. How “fast” the result is really depends on how quickly you read.

I used Procyon’s version of a similar test to round out my AI testing. Although this test also provides time-to-first-token and token-per-second benchmarks, I used the overall score instead. This test downloads four models, not one, and compares the performance on all four.

Unfortunately, the test wouldn’t run on Arm or AMD Ryzen processors. The output is a bit messy, but Intel’s Lunar Lake wins again.

Evaluating battery life is a holistic exercise, where the laptop, its chip, display, cooling, and battery all play some role. Of the laptops I’ve tested above, here’s how the battery life shapes up: excellent across the board. I set the display luminance at the same level for all laptops, than used the UL’s battery rundown test that essentially loops its office benchmark over and over until the battery expires — simulating a marathon all-nighter of work.

• Asus 14 OLED (Intel Lunar Lake): 17 hours, 7 minutes
• Surface Laptop 7th Edition (Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite): 16 hours, 20 minutes
• Asus ZenBook S 16 (AMD Ryzen AI 300): 10 hours, 42 minutes
• Asus ZenBook 14 OLED (Intel Meteor Lake): 10 hours, 35 minutes

To that, the MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo (B2HMG) with the Arrow Lake-H chip inside recorded between 15 hours, 10 minutes and 16 hours, 33 minutes of battery life, with an average of about 15 hours, 50 minutes over several runs. That’s outstanding, as is the battery life of virtually all of these laptops.

Conclusion: Should you buy a laptop with a Core Ultra 200H chip?

I’m convinced that, yes, you should. As a general-purpose PC processor, Intel’s Arrow Lake-H chip soars to the top of the heap in most tests, dramatically outperforming Intel’s Lunar Lake chips — which, to be fair, weren’t specifically designed with as much performance in mind.

Instead, the Core Ultra 200V family was designed specifically for long battery life plus AI performance, which is where Intel’s Arrow Lake-H chips still fall short. But basing our battery-life testing on the Procyon Office benchmark, which consistently throws Microsoft Office tasks at the laptop, makes me feel much more confident in saying that you’ll get far more than a typical workday’s workload out of the MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo (B2HMG) and its Arrow Lake-H chip inside of it.

(Remember, the MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo (B2HMG) itself is an engineering sample that’s not available for sale. I’m relatively ambivalent toward it right now — it’s good, but doesn’t really make my heart ache to use it.)

I still think that all three laptop platforms — AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm — are at the top of their game right now, pushing hard. If you want absolutely killer battery life and incredible standby performance, consider a Snapdragon laptop. AMD’s Ryzen platform, meanwhile, excels in most tasks, including gaming. Intel’s Lunar Lake Core Ultra 200V chips are still probably the best choice for both battery life and some AI tasks, with the Core Ultra 200H taking over for general productivity. The Core Ultra 200H doesn’t appear to quite have the chops to serve as a gaming processor, and lacks sufficient NPU TOPS to really run NPU-dependent AI apps.

Right now, Intel’s advantage seems to be that everything runs Intel, giving it a sense that it’s the all-around processor you need. Real life bends more towards Qualcomm’s Snapdragon, at least where Windows’ AI apps are concerned.

If I had to pick the best laptop chip at the moment, however, I’d still lean toward AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 processor. It’s not the top of the heap in most tests, but it’s quite close in many, and rises to the top in gaming and AI. I don’t think AMD’s challenge right now is silicon, but software: Its ROCm AI development environment doesn’t have the ubiquity Intel is tying to push with OpenVINO, and it shows. If you can’t run the app, it doesn’t matter how good the chip is.

I think Intel’s dominance of the laptop market is nearing an end, and instead heading toward an age of relative parity between all three processor platforms. Nerds will still be able to buy the “best” laptop, but it will be important to know what features you’re prioritizing, exactly. Intel’s Core Ultra 200H (Arrow Lake-H) looks exceptionally strong in general productivity and battery life, two key features consumers care deeply about. That will keep Intel’s foes at bay, for now.