Intel Core Ultra 7 251HX silently launched, 6 P-Cores up to 5.1 GHz

It looks like Intel was tired of the leaks and speculations surrounding its "mystery" Arrow Lake-HX CPU. As we recently reported, the Core Ultra 7 251HX was spotted on listings for laptops from vendors MSI and Lenovo. Now, only a few days after the report, Intel has silently made the Core Ultra 7 251HX official without any announcement.

The Core Ultra 7 251HX is part of the Arrow Lake lineup, and slots in just under the Core Ultra 7 255HX. Instead of having 20 cores and threads like its sibling, the 251HX has 18 cores and 18 threads, of which 6 are performance-focused P-cores, and 12 are E-cores. With this core configuration, the Core Ultra 7 251HX sits between the 14-core Ultra 5 245HX and the 20-core Ultra 7 255HX.

The aforementioned laptop listings also had some unconfirmed specs that have now been made official. As mentioned in the listings, the Core Ultra 7 251HX indeed has a 2.9 GHz P-core base clock and a 55W TDP. Of course, the maximum turbo power can reach up to 160W, depending on the type of workload and available thermal headroom.

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The CPU can boost up to 5.1 GHz on the P-cores and 4.5 GHz on the E-cores. Notably, there is a 700 MHz increase in the E-core base clock over the 255HX. The cache layout is the same as the Core Ultra 7 255HX, with 30 MB of L3 cache and 30 MB of total L2 cache. One thing to note is that the 251HX has one fewer Xe3 core than the 255HX, with only three total cores instead of four.

With this announcement (or rather, the product page silently going live), the Core Ultra 7 251HX rounds out Intel's high-end mobile lineup. Currently, the mobile Arrow Lake-HX lineup spans from the 14-core Core Ultra 5 235HX to the 24-core Ultra 9 290HX Plus. The Ultra 7 251HX is the most basic 7-series SKU, but it may be a popular option for laptop manufacturers if it delivers a good price-to-performance ratio.