The Intel Core Ultra 7 165H is a high-end laptop processor of the Meteor Lake series. This 1st Gen Core Ultra chip has come to replace 13th generation Core chips; it has 16 cores (6 + 8 + 2) and 22 threads at its disposal. The 16 cores are comprised of 6 HT-enabled Performance cores running at up to 5.0 GHz and 10 Efficient cores (8 main cores plus 2 extra ones found in the Low Power Island) running at up to 3.8 GHz. Two of the 10 E-cores are located in the Low Power Island.
The 8-core Arc GPU, just out of the oven, serves as the integrated graphics adapter - this runs at up to 2.30 GHz - and there is a bevy of other brand-new technologies on offer as well, including the integrated AI Boost NPU with two Gen 3 engines for hardware AI workload acceleration.
Architecture and Features
With Meteor Lake, Intel intends to deliver higher CPU performance, higher GPU performance and at the same time, longer battery life than what Raptor Lake chips were capable of. The company also wants a large piece of the AI cake and is working with Microsoft and other partners to make that happen. As a result, Windows Defender is now AI-enabled, meaning it can use the Intel NPU to take some of the load off the main CPU cores. We also get this new Intel Device Discovery technology that is designed to give us a better hardware-based remote laptop management than ever before; and, to make things even better, Intel now offers a dedicated Arc Pro graphics driver for workstations.
This generation of Intel Core processors features Redwood architecture P-cores and Crestmont architecture E-cores. Both come with architectural improvements over Raptor Cove and Gracemont respectively for slightly higher performance-per-clock figures; the interesting thing is that of the 10 E-cores, two are actually a separate cluster located on what Intel calls a "Low Power Island". Essentially, the latter is an SoC within an SoC that can stay active while most other parts of the chip are temporarily switched off to save power. The low-power E-cores run at up to 2.5 GHz. Intel hopes this approach will let it deliver unprecedentedly low power consumption figures when under low load, boosting battery life of laptops and tablets powered by Meteor Lake.
To build Meteor Lake processors, Intel uses the Foveros technology (stacking several chips on top of each other). This is a cost-cutting measure more than anything else, as manufacturing several small dies on several different processes is so much cheaper than making a huge single die and hoping that there are no defects in it that will require disabling some parts of it.
Elsewhere, the Core Ultra 7 165H comes with 24 MB of L3 cache and a very healthy number of PCIe 5 and PCIe 4 lanes for NVMe SSD speeds up to 15.7 GB/s. vPro Enterprise and business-centric features such as the Remote Platform Erase are onboard as well. It supports RAM running at up to 7467 MHz (DDR5-5600, LPDDR5-7467, LPDDR5x-7467, to be specific - which is about as good as what 8040 series Ryzen chips have). Naturally, the chip also features built-in Thunderbolt 4 support and Intel CNVi Wi-Fi support; fascinatingly enough, Intel chose to keep native SATA III support that AMD had removed from its Ryzen processors quite a while ago.
The 165H is compatible with 64-bit Windows 10, 64-bit Windows 11 and with many Linux distros.
Performance
If one chooses to trust the official Intel performance data, then the 165H is about as fast as the Ryzen 9 6900HX (Zen 3 Plus, 8 cores, 16 threads, up to 4.9 GHz), as far as multi-thread benchmark scores are concerned. This isn't a ground-breaking result but let's just wait for our in-house testing results instead of jumping to conclusions.
Either way, real-world performance of the chip may vary significantly depending on how high the CPU power limits are and how competent the cooling solution of the system is.
A proper DX12 Ultimate graphics adapter, the Arc is no stranger to ray tracing and other modern technologies including AI frame generation (XeSS). It will let you connect up to four SUHD 4320p monitors and it will both HW-encode and HW-encode the most widely used video codecs including AVC, HEVC and AV1 in a fast and efficient manner.
Your mileage may vary depending on how high the CPU power limits are, how competent the cooling solution of your system is, how fast the RAM of your system is. The latter is really important; Intel stresses that for the Arc to deliver the best results possible, multi-channel RAM configuration is a must.
Power consumption
This mighty Core Ultra 7 series processor has a Base power consumption of 28 W, while its Turbo power consumption is not supposed to exceed 115 W. A powerful cooling solution is a must for any system powered by this chip.
The 165H is comprised of five small chips ("tiles") that are connected using Intel's Foveros technology. The tile containing main CPU cores is produced on the fairly modern 7 nm Intel process marketed as Intel 4 while most other tiles (the iGPU, the I/O die, ...) are built with TSMC's N5 and N6 processes. The base tile is built with the old Intel 22FFL process.
The Ryzen 7 PRO 8840HS is a powerful processor (APU) of the Hawk Point family. This isn't an entirely new laptop chip; instead, it's a rebadged Ryzen 7 7840U with a slightly higher wattage as well as higher clock speeds on the Ryzen AI NPU. The 8840HS has eight Zen 4 cores running at 3.3 GHz to 5.1 GHz that are SMT-enabled for a total of 16 processing threads, while the great Radeon 780M is responsible for 3D processing and similar duties. Compared to the consumer 8840HS, the PRO variant supports AMD PRO technologies with management features and usually longer availability and support.
Architecture & Features
Hawk Point family chips are powered by the Zen 4 architecture, much like Phoenix and Dragon Range family chips are. That's not to say there is no difference between the three. With Hawk Point, AMD is betting big on generative AI; these processors are set to deliver an up to 40% increase in generative AI performance over 7040 series APUs, making apps like DaVinci Resolve and Adobe Photoshop more useful than ever before.
Unlike Zen 3, Zen 4 features AVX512 support and, thanks to a plethora of other improvements including larger caches/registers/buffers, is slated to bring a double-digit IPC improvement over the former.
Elsewhere, the R7 PRO 8840HS has 16 MB of L3 cache and support for super-fast DDR5-5600 and LPDDR5x-7500 RAM. The chip is compatible with USB 4 and therefore with Thunderbolt. It comes with 20 PCIe 4 lanes, giving NVMe SSDs up to 7.8 GB/s of throughput.
Systems built around this Ryzen 7 series APU are designed to run 64-bit Windows 11, 64-bit Windows 10, or Linux. Please note that this processor is not overclockable and neither is it user-replaceable. It gets soldered down for good instead (FP7, FP7r2, FP8 socket interfaces).
Performance
Since this is a 7840U in disguise that we are dealing with here, it is safe to expect the 8840HS to be about as fast as the Core i7-12650H, as far as multi-thread performance is concerned.
Your mileage may vary depending on how high the CPU power limits are, and how competent the cooling solution of your laptop is.
Graphics
The Radeon 780M has 12 CUs (768 shaders) purring away at up to 2,700 MHz. This is exactly the right iGPU for people looking for a bit more horsepower than what Intel's aging Xe options can provide. The Radeon will let you use up to 4 monitors with resolutions as high as SUHD 4320p and it will also HW-decode and HW-encode the most widely used video codecs (including AV1, HEVC and AVC) without breaking a sweat. In terms of gaming, the thing is good enough for 1080p and medium-to-low settings, as of late 2023.
Your mileage may vary depending on how high the CPU power limits are, how competent the cooling solution of your system is, how fast the RAM of your system is (there is no dedicated VRAM here).
Power consumption
This Ryzen 7 series chip has a long-term power limit (default TDP) of 28 W that laptop makers are free to tune to their liking, with values between 20 W and 30 W greenlighted by AMD. Either way, an active cooling solution is a must for any system powered by this chip.
The 8840HS is built with TSMC's 4 nm process for high, as of late 2023, energy efficiency.
The Intel Core Ultra 9 185H is the top-of-the-line Meteor Lake family chip that debuted in December 2023. This 1st Gen Core Ultra processor has come to replace 13th generation Core chips; it has 16 cores (6 + 8 + 2) and 22 threads at its disposal. Its Performance cores, of which there are 6, are SMT-enabled and run at up to 5.1 GHz while its Efficient cores, of which there are 10 (8 main cores plus 2 extra ones found in the Low Power Island) run at up to 3.8 GHz. The 8-core Arc GPU, just out of the oven, serves as the integrated graphics adapter - this runs at up to 2.35 GHz - and there is a bevy of other brand-new technologies on offer as well, such as the integrated AI Boost NPU with two Gen 3 engines for hardware AI workload acceleration.
Architecture and Features
With Meteor Lake, Intel intends to deliver higher CPU performance, higher GPU performance and at the same time, longer battery life than what Raptor Lake chips were capable of. The company also wants a large piece of the AI cake and is working with Microsoft and other partners to make that happen. As a result, Windows Defender is now AI-enabled, meaning it can use the Intel NPU to take some of the load off the main CPU cores. We also get this new Intel Device Discovery technology that is designed to give us a better hardware-based remote laptop management than ever before; and, to make things even better, Intel now offers a dedicated Arc Pro graphics driver for workstations.
This generation of Intel Core processors features Redwood architecture P-cores and Crestmont architecture E-cores. Both come with slight architectural improvements over Raptor Cove and Gracemont respectively for slightly higher performance-per-clock figures; the interesting thing is that of the 10 E-cores, two are actually a separate cluster located on what Intel calls a "Low Power Island". Essentially, the latter is an SoC within an SoC that can stay active while the rest of the chip is turned off to save power. The low-power E-cores run at up to 2.5 GHz. Intel hopes that this approach will let it deliver unprecedentedly low power consumption figures when under low load, boosting battery life of laptops and tablets powered by Meteor Lake.
To build its Meteor Lake processors, Intel uses the Foveros technology (stacking several chips on top of each other). This is a cost-cutting measure more than anything else, as manufacturing several small dies on several different processes is so much cheaper than making a huge single die and hoping that there are no defects in it that will require disabling some parts of it.
Elsewhere, the Core Ultra 9 185H comes with 24 MB of L3 cache and a very healthy number of PCIe 5 and PCIe 4 lanes for NVMe SSD speeds up to 15.7 GB/s. vPro Enterprise and business-centric features such as the Remote Platform Erase are onboard as well. It supports RAM running at up to 7467 MHz (DDR5-5600, LPDDR5-7467, LPDDR5x-7467, to be specific - which is about as good as what 8040 series Ryzen chips have). Naturally, the chip also features built-in Thunderbolt 4 support and Intel CNVi Wi-Fi support; fascinatingly enough, Intel chose to keep native SATA III support that AMD had removed from its Ryzen processors quite a while ago.
The 185H is compatible with 64-bit Windows 10, 64-bit Windows 11 and with many Linux distros.
Performance
If one chooses to trust the official Intel performance data, then the 185H is not a whole lot faster than the Ryzen 9 6900HX (Zen 3 Plus, 8 cores, 16 threads, up to 4.9 GHz), as far as multi-thread performance is concerned. This isn't a ground-breaking result but let's just wait for our in-house testing results instead of jumping to conclusions.
Either way, real-world performance of the chip may vary significantly depending on how high the CPU power limits are and how competent the cooling solution of the system is.
A proper DX12 Ultimate graphics adapter, the Arc is no stranger to ray tracing and other modern technologies including AI frame generation (XeSS). It will let you connect up to four SUHD 4320p monitors and it will both HW-encode and HW-encode the most widely used video codecs including AVC, HEVC and AV1 in a fast and efficient manner.
Your mileage may vary depending on how high the CPU power limits are, how competent the cooling solution of your system is, how fast the RAM of your system is. The latter is really important; Intel stresses that for the Arc to deliver the best results possible, multi-channel RAM configuration is a must.
Power consumption
This mighty Core Ultra 9 series processor has a "base" power consumption of 45 W, while its Turbo power consumption is not supposed to exceed 115 W. A powerful cooling solution will be needed to sort out this chip's hot temper.
The 185H is comprised of five small chips ("tiles") that are connected using Intel's Foveros technology. The tile containing main CPU cores is produced on the modern 7 nm Intel process marketed as Intel 4 while most other tiles (the iGPU, the I/O die, ...) are built with TSMC's N5 and N6 processes. The base tile is built with the old Intel 22FFL process.
Average Benchmarks Intel Core Ultra 7 165H → 100%n=25
Average Benchmarks AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 8840HS → 106%n=25
Average Benchmarks Intel Core Ultra 9 185H → 115%n=25
- Range of benchmark values for this graphics card - Average benchmark values for this graphics card * Smaller numbers mean a higher performance 1 This benchmark is not used for the average calculation
v1.33
log 15. 01:32:36
#0 ran 0s before starting gpusingle class +0s ... 0s
#1 checking url part for id 16905 +0s ... 0s
#2 checking url part for id 18727 +0s ... 0s
#3 checking url part for id 16921 +0s ... 0s
#4 redirected to Ajax server, took 1755214356s time from redirect:0 +0s ... 0s
#5 did not recreate cache, as it is less than 5 days old! Created at Wed, 13 Aug 2025 05:18:40 +0200 +0s ... 0s
#6 composed specs +0.006s ... 0.006s
#7 did output specs +0s ... 0.006s
#8 getting avg benchmarks for device 16905 +0.003s ... 0.009s
#9 got single benchmarks 16905 +0.006s ... 0.016s
#10 getting avg benchmarks for device 18727 +0.004s ... 0.02s
#11 got single benchmarks 18727 +0.005s ... 0.025s
#12 getting avg benchmarks for device 16921 +0.001s ... 0.026s
#13 got single benchmarks 16921 +0.004s ... 0.03s
#14 got avg benchmarks for devices +0s ... 0.03s
#15 min, max, avg, median took s +0.054s ... 0.084s
- Average benchmark values for this graphics card
