Intel’s new laptop silicon
Intel rolled out Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus and 270HX Plus for high‑end gaming laptops, with vendors like ASUS ROG adopting the chips and Intel claiming up to an 8% gaming uplift versus the previous Arrow Lake Refresh. Panther Lake’s broader roadmap also promises up to 60% better multi‑thread throughput over Lunar Lake for creators and heavy multitaskers. (trustedreviews.com) (tomshardware.com)
The Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus is a 24-core hybrid mobile chip with an 8P+16E layout, peak P‑core boost up to 5.5 GHz, 40 MB of L2 and 36 MB of L3 cache and a 55 W PL1 thermal rating (PL2 listed at 160 W), built from multi‑chip packaging on TSMC process nodes. (notebookcheck.net) The Core Ultra 7 270HX Plus ships with 20 total cores (8P + 12E), P‑core ranges to 5.3 GHz and E‑cores up to 4.7 GHz, and it carries 36 MB of L2 cache with 30 MB of shared L3 on Arrow Lake HX silicon. (hothardware.com) Intel’s new Binary Optimization Tool is packaged as an optional “advanced mode” under Intel Application Optimization and Intel Dynamic Tuning Technology and is intended to translate or re‑optimize existing binaries to raise instructions‑per‑cycle on select games and workloads. (newsroom.intel.com) The “Plus” refresh also raises die‑to‑die interconnect frequency by as much as 900 MHz versus prior HX parts, a change Intel says tightens the CPU–memory controller link and reduces system latency in latency‑sensitive titles. (newsroom.intel.com) Intel’s press release lists March 17, 2026 as the start of OEM availability, but PCWorld reports the rollout is staggered in waves with Lenovo’s Legion and Razer’s Blade shipping immediately, Dell’s Alienware 18 slated for March 31, ASUS likely delayed into late May, and some Acer models slipping to July. (newsroom.intel.com) ASUS’s ROG lineup already shows specific G16 and G18 Strix SKUs configured around the 290HX Plus paired with NVIDIA RTX 50‑series laptop GPUs and high‑refresh ROG Nebula displays, while ASUS confirms a Strix SCAR 18 flagship planned for Q2 2026. (rog.asus.com) Platform features include dual‑channel DDR5‑6400 support, up to 13 TOPS NPU acceleration on the HX die, PCIe Gen‑5 connectivity for discrete GPUs and NVMe, and OEMs are advertising next‑gen I/O such as Thunderbolt 5 and Wi‑Fi 7 on select designs. (notebookcheck.net)
