Intel is trying to make debacles like the Cloudstrike outage of 2024 a thing of the past.
At MWC in Barcelona, Intel announced vPro commercial editions of the "Arrow Lake" family of Intel Core Ultra chipsets, including the Core Ultra 200U, H, HX, and S suffixes, so the entire Intel Core Ultra 200 series now has vPro enterprise-ready variants.
With the full slate of Core Ultra 200 series CPUs available for commercial use, Intel's enterprise portfolio will cover the gamut of powerful compute performance to high power efficiency with the embedded hardware security Intel's vPro systems are known for.
“You see serious gen-over-gen, double-digit plus/minus performance gain,” Intel’s vice president of the Client Computing Group and general manager of Client Segments, David Feng tells Laptop Mag.
Alongside the new hardware, Intel also announced new service updates to the vPro platform to make it easier for companies to enroll in Intel's Fleet Services for active support in case of major outages.
“It’s not just about power and performance anymore, it's multiple pillars that you need to look at from a commercial perspective. It’s security, manageability, systems stability, and sustainability,” Intel’s General Manager of Commercial Client Segments, Jennifer Larson, tells Laptop Mag.
Arrow Lake vPro
With the new Intel Core Ultra 200U, 200H, 200HX, and 200S vPro variants, the entire Core Ultra 200 series is now commercially viable.
The Core Ultra 200H and HX series offer up to 20% increases in multithread performance compared to the Intel Core Ultra 100 and Intel 14th gen CPUs. While we have yet to get our hands on an Intel Core Ultra 200HX system for testing, we were able to confirm Intel's performance claims on a few launch systems for the "Arrow Lake" 200H series. If we see similar performance from the 200HX, that would make the Core Ultra 200 series a worthwhile upgrade even for users on newer systems.
But for enterprise customers who tend to work on a three to five-year upgrade cycle, the Core Ultra 200 series is a massive overhaul across raw computing power and efficiency when compared against Intel's 11th gen CPUs, offering up to 2.84x higher multicore performance in Cinebench 2024 and nearly 2x faster video editing.
“For commercial, given that four years is kind of the plus/minus refresh cycle, we compared against the 11th gen,” Feng explains. “As you can imagine, massive, massive gain across the board for almost 3x the MT [multithreaded] performance.”
vPro Service updates
But Intel’s vPro systems include more than just powerful commercial hardware. Intel vPro chipsets come with hardware and software security systems designed for commercial purposes.
Intel started the vPro line 19 years ago to meet the needs of IT professionals, and includes fleet deployment systems, increased security and manageability, connectivity, and device stability with a reported 99.7% app compatibility.
Intel’s vPro Fleet Service is an SaaS (software-as-a-service) commercial solution is being upgraded for an easier enrollment process, dropping the enrollment steps from 24 down to six, and the new Fleet Services will no longer require on-premises servers.
So businesses that didn’t enroll or did not meet the requirements previously can recover faster from disruptions.
Intel vPro Fleet Services is in a private preview now and will be available in the coming weeks. Intel vPro will also be integrated into Microsoft Intune, coming later this year.
Intel also introduced the Intel Assured Supply Chain (ASC) program, which will offer customers greater visibility and assurance in the silicon manufacturing process. So, customers with enhanced security needs can be aware of the entire chain of custody for each chip.
”We just came out with our product security report,” Larson tells Laptop. “A third-party evaluation firm rated us number one as compared to our competitors in security assurance. We break what we build.”
Intel Core Ultra 200 vPro availability
Intel Core Ultra 200V systems with the Intel vPro platform are currently available.
Intel Core Ultra 200U, 200H, 200HX, and 200S series systems with vPro are expected to ship in late March 2025.
Intel's vPro Fleet Services is in preview and will be available generally in the next few weeks, while the Intel Assured Supply Chain program will start later this year, likely in late Summer or Fall 2025.
What you need to know
While Intel's Arrow Lake 200S desktop chips saw a number of performance issues at launch, Intel has worked to patch that experience for better, more consistent performance and efficiency gains.
Arrow Lake 200H saw a successful launch last month and the first 200HX systems are expected in the coming weeks. The vPro editions of these chips will be launching around the same time frame, offering a wide range of chips to meet the needs of multiple industries and jobs.
On the heels of major service outages and security failures from the competiton, the robust hardware and software security value makes Intel vPro a more attractive solution than ever. And the new vPro chips do offer on-device AI for additional security and commercial features.
For gamers and general consumers, vPro isn’t much of a concern, but the enterprise business is a massive market for Intel, and the company is dedicated to maintaining that lead. Intel’s enterprise business helps the company build better gaming and AI chipsets and develop affordable discrete GPUs.
After all of the buyout rumors and the loss of former CEO Pat Gelsinger, today’s vPro news is a reminder that Intel is still a company with plenty of success to its name.
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