Intel Core Ultra 5 225H delivers 14% better single core and 16% improved iGPU performance than Meteor Lake per early benchmarks — the CPU still falls short of its Lunar Lake counterparts

Intel's upcoming Core Ultra 5 225H from the Arrow Lake-H mobile family has been tested at Geekbench (via Benchleaks), delivering moderate uplifts compared to its predecessor in the CPU and iGPU (OpenCL) departments. However, even this sizeable uplift is still insufficient to leapfrog Lunar Lake, which sits comfortably at the top of the table at much lower power limits.

The Core Ultra 5 225H is the successor to the Core Ultra 5 125H. It features 14 cores (four P + eight E + two LPE) and 14 threads alongside 18MB of L3 cache. The test bench is an upcoming notebook from Samsung—codenamed "NP965XHD"—offering 16GB of unspecified memory. Based on this test, the Core Ultra 5 225H clocked at a maximum of 4.9 GHz—roughly 9% faster than the Core Ultra 5 125H.

Starting with the CPU scores, the Core Ultra 5 225H amassed 2,547 points and 12,448 points in the single-core and multi-core tests, respectively. This lands it 14% faster in single-core performance than the 125H, though multi-core remains a disappointment at just 8% faster; that may be attributed to the lack of hyperthreading. Lunar Lake still takes the lead in single-core while consuming less power. The gap was more prominent with the previously leaked Core Ultra 9 285H, so these results probably do not indicate the final silicon.

Arrow Lake ships with Intel's upgraded Xe-LPG+ architecture with the Core Ultra 5 225H sporting the Arc 130T iGPU with 7 Xe cores (112 Xe Vector Engines) clocked at 2.2 GHz. Oddly enough, 7 Xe-LPG+ cores outperform 7 Xe2 cores (Core Ultra 5 228V), at least in OpenCL, a synthetic test.

To explain this, Lunar Lake operates at a lower TDP (17W - 37W) than Arrow Lake-H (expected to be 28W - 115W). Secondly, Lunar Lake offers faster gaming performance in practice than what theoretical benchmarks suggest, owing to architectural refinements and better drivers. Nonetheless, Core Ultra 5 225H's iGPU scores 16% better than its Meteor Lake equivalent. Real-world performance, however, will primarily be subject to driver support and game optimizations.

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Intel will release the Core Ultra 200H/U/HX/non-K CPUs at CES 2025. Rumors allege that Battlemage will arrive ahead of RDNA 4 and Blackwell as early as next month.