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Intel has a pair of new flagship CPUs coming to a variety of expensive gaming laptops: the Core Ultra 9 290 HX Plus and the Core Ultra 7 270HX Plus. The Arrow Lake Refresh chipsets have 24 cores/24 threads and 20 cores/20 threads respectively. Like Intel Recently announced desktop CPUsthe new Plus models of laptops are “pushed to more enthusiasts,” and also feature the Intel Binary Optimization Tool that can improve native performance “in select games.”
Intel’s Josh Newman said the new chips “deliver meaningful real-world performance gains so users can experience smoother gameplay, faster creation workflows, and more responsive workstation performance.”
There aren’t a lot of details yet in Intel’s reference materials (such as the 270HX Plus’ performance) but with what Intel claims is an 8 percent increase in gaming performance, it’s just a modest gain for the flagship 290HX Plus over the last-gen Core Ultra 9’s 285HX. For someone with a four-year-old processor like the “Alder Lake” Core i9-12900HX (16 cores/24 threads), Intel claims a 62 percent increase in 1080p gaming at high settings.
It’s a similar story with creative applications: Intel’s chipset and graphics claims the 290HX Plus scores 7 percent higher than the 285HX on Cinebench 2026 single-threaded performance, and 30 percent higher than the i9-12900HX.
Intel doesn’t have any similar tests or claims for the Core Ultra 7 270HX Plus.
The 290HX Plus graphs show test results on the MSI Titan 18, a gaming laptop that costs around $6,000. I Titan 18 review With an Intel 285HX chip and an RTX 5090 laptop GPU, it was a formidable (if also huge and very expensive) laptop for 4K gaming.
The new Arrow Lake Refresh chips will also have “up to 900MHz die-to-die frequency boost” to reduce system latency by increasing the speed of the CPU/memory controller link. There’s no word on when the new laptops with the 290HX Plus and 270HX Plus chips will launch, but Intel is turning to OEMs like Asus, Acer, MSI Alienware, Lenovo, HP, and Razer to launch new models soon.