Intel Core 200U CPU spotted with Alder Lake silicon — Core 7 250U shows identical configuration as the Core 7 150U, Core i7-1355U and Core i7-1255U

As spotted by hardware enthusiast momomo_us on X (formerly Twitter), new entries of Intel’s upcoming Core 7 250U at SiSoftware, under Intel’s Core “Non Ultra” 200U series, indicate that it is rebranded Alder Lake silicon. This can be attributed to the cache layout, which has remained unchanged in Intel’s U family of processors with Alder Lake, Raptor Lake, Core 100, and now Core 200 series.

The Core 7 250U hosts a deca-core layout divided into two performance cores and eight efficient cores. In this benchmark, the CPU hit 5 GHz across the performance cores, 400 MHz lower than last generation’s Core 7 150U. The efficient cores remained at 4 GHz, which aligns with this CPU’s predecessor.

Raptor Lake’s primary reasons for beating Alder Lake, despite being on par in terms of IPC, were more cache and higher clock speeds. Raptor Lake offered 3MB of L3 cache per slice, 2MB of L2 cache per each P-core, and 4MB of L2 cache per each E-core cluster.

Funnily enough, this particular CPU’s Result ID confirms our suspicion as it cuts the cache down to Alder Lake levels. For those who’d like a more statistical perspective, the Core 7 250U currently has 6.5MB of L2 cache, and had it been based on Raptor Lake, we could’ve seen 12MB, almost 2x more.

The same conclusion may also extend to the recently discovered Core “Non Ultra” 200H CPUs. While the argument of low production costs is valid, this strategy might confuse the not-so-tech-savvy folk in our community who may hold on to the idea that any CPU with the “Core 200” moniker is based on Arrow Lake. However, that isn’t the case since the chips that lack the Ultra branding are based on previous silicon.

AMD’s approach is no different. The Ryzen 7000 mobile series consisted of Zen 2, Zen 3, and Zen 4 under a new naming scheme, but AMD abandoned that naming scheme with Zen 5 this year, following the AI hype train (see AMD Ryzen AI 300).