Intel Core Ultra 9 185H

Launched in December 2023, the Intel Core Ultra 9 185H is the flagship of Intel's new Meteor Lake generation. With the new CPU generation, Intel is heralding a new chapter in its nomenclature.

Technical data and performance of the Intel Core Ultra 9 185H
The Intel Core Ultra 9 185H has six performance cores that support hyperthreading and eight efficiency cores. In the new tile/chiplet design, two additional low-power efficiency cores are also installed on the low-power island, which then take over in idle mode and at low load, thus helping to save power. The Intel Core Ultra 9 185H has a total of 22 threads and 24 MB L3 cache, which can be used to quickly retrieve and process frequently used data. Intel specifies the power consumption at 45 watts; in low-power mode, the CPU only requires 35 watts, but then only clocks at 1 GHz. In Boost mode, the consumption can increase to up to 115 watts, but then the CPU also clocks at up to 5.1 GHz. In comparison: The Intel Core i7-14650HX from the Raptor Lake Refresh series reaches up to 5.2 GHz in Boost, but then also consumes up to 157 watts. At the lowest power consumption of 45 watts, it then clocks at 1.6 GHz, but has eight performance cores and a total of 24 threads with a 6 MB larger L3 cache.

Integrated graphics card and additional functions

Intel is also breaking new ground with the integrated graphics unit from the Meteor Lake generation onwards: The Intel Core Ultra 9 185H uses an Intel Arc iGPU with eight cores. The new iGPU is based on the Xe LPG architecture, an efficiency-focused adaptation of the architecture of dedicated Arc GPUs. In addition to the eight Xe cores, the Intel Arc 8C GPU 2.35 GHz has eight ray tracing units, eight samplers and four pixel backends and is manufactured using the 5nm process. According to Intel, the performance has doubled compared to the Intel Iris Xe Graphics G7 96 EUs. This means that everyday tasks are no problem for the new iGPU and even light video and image editing as well as gaming at low detail levels should not overtax it.

The Intel Core Ultra 9 185H supports WiFi 7 and Thunderbolt, but is already installed in devices with WiFi 7. The memory controller supports up to 96 GB DDR5-5600 or up to 64 GB LPDDR5x-7467 RAM. Intel Core i7-14700HX and Intel Core i9-14900HX can be installed with up to 192 GB DDR-5600.

Conclusion
All in all, the Intel Core Ultra 9 185H is a very powerful processor that can be used for gaming and other computing-intensive applications, e.g. in workstations. Although its maximum clock frequency is not as high as other Intel models, it boasts an energy-saving design. This makes it a good choice for anyone looking for a powerful and energy-efficient CPU.

The Intel Core Ultra 9 185H is already installed in various devices. The notebook with WiFi 7 mentioned above can be found in the Prestige 16 series from MSI, for example.

Status: 01/2024