Intel launches powerful laptop chips to reclaim market share

The last two families of central processing units (CPUs) for laptops come from Intel (INTC 0.70%) were more focused on AI efficiency and capabilities than raw performance. Intel launched Meteor Lake in late 2023, which moved to a tile-based architecture and used the Intel 4 manufacturing process for the compute tile. Meteor Lake delivered solid gains in efficiency and graphics performance, but performance regressed in other areas compared to older chips.

Intel followed Meteor Lake with Lunar Lake in the second half of 2024. Lunar Lake bet everything on efficiency, taking advantage of an external manufacturing process of TSMC and move the memory on the chip. Lunar Lake laptops offer impressive battery life, making the chip family the ideal solution to counter Qualcommit’s effective ArmPC chips based on. Like Meteor Lake, however, Lunar Lake was not focused on raw performance.

Bringing Arrow Lake to laptops

Intel launched its Arrow Lake desktop processors in late 2024. Like Lunar Lake, Arrow Lake outsourced manufacturing to TSMC after abandoning the canceled Intel 20A process. Compared to the last generation Raptor Lake Refresh desktop chips, Arrow Lake chips delivered significant gains in power efficiency and performance across many productivity workloads. Unfortunately, the chips initially exhibited erratic behavior during gaming workloads, leading to poor reviews.

Intel has rolled out software patches that should improve the gaming situation just in time for the launch of Arrow Lake family laptop variants. Intel announced a slew of new laptop chips at CES 2025 with a complex lineup spanning multiple architectures. The Core Ultra 200H and Core Ultra 200HX families are both based on Arrow Lake and bring Arrow Lake’s performance and efficiency improvements to laptops.

While Lunar Lake maxed out at 8 cores, with a mix of performance and efficiency cores, these Arrow Lake laptop chips feature up to 24 cores. The top-end 200HX model comes with 8 performance cores and 16 efficiency cores, a configuration that should deliver solid single-threaded and multi-threaded performance. Importantly, these Arrow Lake chips should also be much more power efficient than older Raptor Lake laptop chips.

Fight AMD

Intel is steadily losing market share in the PC processor market. Advanced micro-devices for much of the last decade. In the laptop processor market, Intel still had a unit market share of 77.7% in the second quarter of 2024. However, this is a decline from over 90% in 2016.

Intel’s new Arrow Lake laptop chips are expected to improve the company’s competitive positioning in the enthusiast and gaming segments of the laptop markets. Lunar Lake does a good job of going after the thin and light end of the market, and that makes Qualcomm’s Arm-based chips less appealing, especially since Qualcomm laptops suffer from some compatibility issues. For mainstream, performance laptops, Raptor Lake is power-hungry and suffered from embarrassing stability issues that likely led some laptop buyers to turn to AMD. Intel’s new Arrow Lake chips should right both of these wrongs.

The PC market isn’t particularly strong right now, although Windows 10 will reach end of support in October 2025. As Windows 11 requires fairly modern hardware, this could spark a flood of new laptop purchases, including among companies. With Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake laptops available for early 2025, and with Panther Lake arriving in the second half built on the Intel 18A process, Intel should be in a good position to reap the benefits of any upgrade cycle.

Intel faces tough competition from AMD, but its new Arrow Lake laptop chips could help it regain lost market share, or at the very least stay the course while moving its leaf forward manufacturing route.

Timothy Green holds positions at Intel. The Motley Fool holds positions and recommends Advanced Micro Devices, Intel, Qualcomm and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. The Motley Fool recommends the following options: Short February 2025 $27 calls on Intel. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.