Intel’s upcoming Arrow Lake-S processors will have a lot to prove when they launch in October/November 2024. From stability to power efficiency and performance, it’ll be a tough crowd to please. The high failure rates of the 13th/14th Gen chips will only make it harder for consumers to trust Intel’s newest offerings. Luckily for all of us, Arrow Lake features upgraded core architectures and a more efficient process technology.
Arrow Lake will feature the same core counts as the 13th and 14th Gen Raptor Lake family, with the Core Ultra 9 285K/15900K packing 24 cores, including 8 P and 16 E-cores. Hyper-threading will be lacking, but that shouldn’t matter for most users, especially gamers. What will affect gaming performance are the CPU boost clocks which according to Raichu, will drop by as much as 500 MHz compared to existing Raptor Lake parts.
| CPU | Cores | Threads | All-Core Boost | 1C Boost Clock |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Core Ultra 9 285K | 24 | 24 | 5.4 GHz? | 5.70 GHz |
| Core i9-14900KS | 24 | 32 | 5.9 GHz | 6.20 GHz |
| Core i9-14900K | 24 | 32 | 5.7 GHz | 6 GHz |
| Core i9-13900KS | 24 | 32 | 5.7 GHz | 6 GHz |
| Core i9-13900K | 24 | 32 | 5.5 GHz | 5.8 GHz |
| Ryzen 9 9950X | 16 | 32 | 5.7 GHz | 5.85 GHz |
Consequently, Intel will be back to pre-Raptor Lake boost clocks when Arrow Lake first launches this fall. That makes sense as Alder Lake was the chipmaker’s first 7nm (Intel 7) desktop family, similar to how Arrow Lake will be the first 4nm/2nm (Intel 4/20A) desktop lineup. These clocks are still higher than Alder Lake (5.20 GHz), and roughly the same as AMD’s Ryzen 9000 (5.85 GHz) offerings.
Being on a denser node, the Core Ultra 9 285K (15900K) and its K-series siblings will likely run as hot as Raptor Lake, despite featuring lower operating clocks. This will likely factor into the effective boost clocks achieved by the majority of users.
