Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus review: The new best $200 CPU

Intel has introduced the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus CPU, priced at $200, targeting budget-conscious builders and competing with AMD's entry-level 6-core offerings. Despite some weaknesses in gaming performance compared to AMD's X3D chips, the 250K Plus offers strong productivity performance. The CPU features 18 cores split across P-cores and E-cores, with improvements in cache size and clock speeds compared to the previous model. Intel also introduced the Intel Binary Optimization Tool to optimize instructions for better performance on the Arrow Lake architecture.