Intel’s official performance slides of its upcoming Arrow Lake-S flagship, the Core Ultra 9 285K have leaked out, and things aren’t looking good for Team Blue. The 24-core (8P+16E) CPU, which lacks hyper-threading, offers gaming performance similar to the 14th Gen Core i9-14900K and AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X. However, that doesn’t say much, as the Core Ultra 9 285K will compete with the Ryzen 9000X3D family, and to a lesser degree, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D and its siblings.
Intel Core Ultra 9 285K vs Core i9-14900K
The Core Ultra 9 285K is (officially) up to 15% faster than the i9-14900K in F1 2023 and 11% faster in a similar game. However, it’s 7-13% slower in F1 2024, Final Fantasy XIV, and Far Cry 6 (I think) while managing a tie in the six remaining games.
Intel Core Ultra 9 285K vs AMD Ryzen 9 9950X
Compared to the Ryzen 9 9950X, the Core Ultra 9 285K posts six ties, four wins, and five losses. The wins produce deltas of 4% to 11%, as do the losses. There’s also the matter of these being first-party benchmarks, potentially portraying the SKUs in the best possible light. As we saw with the Ryzen 9000 launch, the real-world gaming performance will (likely) be worse.
Intel Core Ultra 9 285K vs Ryzen 7 7950X3D
A small set of benchmarks compares the Core Ultra 9 285K to the Ryzen 9 7950X3D. Here, the former registers one win (+15%), two losses (13-21%), and two ties. Cherry-picked. Content creation benchmarks like Blender, PhotoShop, Cinebench, and POV-Ray are more positive, highlighting gains ranging from 5% to 30%.
Why is Intel Core Ultra 9 285K “Arrow Lake-S” Slower in Gaming?
Intel claims an IPC uplift of 9% with the Arrow Lake-S P-cores, codenamed Lion Cove, versus Raptor Cove which powers the 13th and 14th Gen lineups. The L2 cache has also increased from 2MB to 4MB per P-core. So, why are Intel’s Core Ultra 200 processors looking so mediocre in gaming?
High Cache and Memory Latency
There are a few reasons, primarily concerning the cache and memory bandwidth. As demonstrated by David Huang, the P-core memory latency on the Core Ultra 258V is notably higher than the 13700H past a certain data load. AMD’s Ryzen HX370 “Strix Point” has tighter memory latencies in the same segment.
Lower Boost and Ring Clocks
Arrow Lake-S also features lower boost clocks than Raptor Lake. While the Core i9-14900K has a peak boost clock of 6 GHz (1-2C), the Core Ultra 9 285K tops out at 5.7 GHz. It also has a lower ringbus clock, leading to higher inter-core latency. These shortfalls are likely due to Arrow Lake being Intel’s first tiled desktop lineup, one that’s fabbed on an external node (TSMC N3B), versus Raptor Lake which was fabbed on a mature internal node (Intel 7).
FAQs
- Q: How much will Intel’s Core Ultra 200S processors, especially the Core Ultra 9 285K cost in the retail market?
- A: At launch, they should be priced similarly to the MSRPs of the preceding 13th and 14th Gen processors. However, like the Ryzen 9000 stack, the prices should gradually decrease post-release.
- Q: Will Intel’s Core Ultra 200S “Arrow Lake” CPUs be irrelevant to gamers?
- A: No, we expect similar or slightly worse performance than the 14th Gen Raptor Lake-R lineup which stacks quite well against AMD’s Ryzen 9000 family. They won’t be the best gaming CPUs, but if priced right, they’ll stay relevant long enough.
- Q: What about content creation performance? Will the lack of hyper-threading (SMT) lead to worse rendering, editing, and creation capabilities?
- A: Content creation performance should be decent. Unlike gaming, it’s mostly compute-bound rather than memory (latency) limited. Thanks to the massive 32% IPC uplift on the E-core side with Skymont, Arrow Lake should perform similarly or faster than AMD’s Ryzen 9000 CPUs in rendering.
- Q: What about future upgrade paths? Will the upcoming LGA1851 motherboards be retained for future Core Ultra desktop processors like Nova Lake?
- A: Rumors claim that the 800-series chipset motherboards leveraging the LGA1851 socket will be a one-time thing, but it’s hard to be sure. Intel may release a rebrand/refresh to make it look more long-term.
- Q: What’s the deal with Bartlett Lake? Are we finally getting processors with up to 12 P-cores and no E-cores?
- A: So sayeth the rumors. Bartlett Lake will feature the same Raptor Cove P-core as Raptor Lake-S but with fixes mitigating the infamous instability issues. They should be supported across 600/700 series motherboards with the LGA1700 socket. Hence, Alder/Raptor Lake platform users are advised to hold tight.
- Q: What about power? Will the Core Ultra 9 285K draw as much power as the Core i9-14900K/13900K?
- A: Roughly as much. Given the Raptor Lake “UNLIMITED POWER” shenanigans, and the popularization of the Intel Default Power profiles, we expect the Core Ultra 9 285K and Core Ultra 7 265K to top out at 250W (out-of-the-box).
- Q: When are the Core Ultra 200 “Arrow Lake-S” CPUs launching?
- A: Seeing as most of the launch marketing slides have leaked out, I reckon by this month’s end.
Sources: HXL, Алексей (via X).
