Intel is preparing its next-generation Arrow Lake desktop platform for a rumored October launch. Given the timing, some of its partners already have chips to test, and we’re now starting to see a trickle of Arrow Lake benchmarks appear online. Saw disappointing results for the Core Ultra 7 CPU, but now we have the numbers for the flagship Core Ultra 285K CPU, and they're much more promising.
The leader of the Arrow Lake family will feature the same 24 cores as the Core i9-14900K. But since it doesn't have hyper-threading, the total number of threads has been reduced by eight, making it 24 threads compared to the previous 32 threads. Despite that limitation, it can still outperform its predecessor in its first benchmarkGeekbench. Numbers appeared online showing the Core Ultra 285K outperforming the 14900K and the newly released Ryzen 9 9950X in both single-core and multi-core performance. according According to Wccftech, its maximum clock speed is 5.7GHz, slightly lower than the 14900K's maximum single-core frequency of 6GHz.
This first sample of the Arrow Lake flagship shows 9% gains in both single-core and multi-core performance over its predecessor.
Credit: Geekbench
This is the first time we've seen boosted clock rates confirmed for the flagship Arrow Lake processor, and the reduced clock rate indicates that Intel might be focusing more on efficiency than outright power with Arrow Lake. It has received plenty of criticism over the years, pun intended, for the amount of cooling its CPUs require, not to mention the current The Raptor Lake Debacle. Intel may finally be addressing that problem with Arrow Lake. Intel has also reportedly told its partners Arrow Lake will consume 100W less than Raptor Lake while high clock speeds are still being achieved, so all hope is lost.
The Geekbench numbers for the Arrow Lake flagship mark a stark difference from the disappointing numbers previously posted for the upper-midrange Core Ultra 7 265KF. That particular CPU’s scores were compared to the Core i7-14700K and showed very modest gains in single-core mode and worse performance in multi-core mode, which we could simply attribute to “early silicon” or something similar.
The Core Ultra 285K was tested on an Asus Z890-A motherboard with 64GB of DDR5-6400 memory. We still don't know much about the features and overclocking options that these new motherboards will bring. They will supposedly debut alongside Arrow Lake when Both will be released on October 10th..
