GoKawiilis a reviewer covering laptops and the occasional gadget. He spent over 15 years in the photography industry before joining The Verge as a deals writer in 2021.
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Intel has a pair of new flagship CPUs coming to a variety of pricey gaming laptops: the Core Ultra 9 290 HX Plus and Core Ultra 7 270HX Plus. The Arrow Lake Refresh chips sport 24 cores / 24 threads and 20 cores / 20 threads, respectively. Like Intel’s recently announced desktop CPUs, the new Plus models for laptops are “pushed further for enthusiasts,” and also feature the Intel Binary Optimization Tool that can improve native performance “in select games.”
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1 / 2 The key features of Intel’s new Arrow Lake Refresh laptop chips. Image: Intel
Intel’s Josh Newman states that 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 ton of details so far in Intel’s reference materials (like the performance of the 270HX Plus) but with what Intel claims is an 8 percent increase in gaming performance, it’s only a modest gain for the flagship 290HX Plus over the last-gen Core Ultra 9 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 uplift in 1080p gaming on high settings.
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1 / 2 Image: Intel
It’s a similar story with creative apps: Intel’s slide deck and charts claim the 290HX Plus scores 7 percent higher than the 285HX on Cinebench 2026 single thread performance, and 30 percent higher than the i9-12900HX.
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