Intel Arrow Lake leaks pour forth – flagship CPU looks to offer some solid gains, but it’s bad news for PC gamers

An efficient flagship that has tamed power usage, but gamers could be very disappointed

News By Darren Allan published 8 October 2024

Intel’s Arrow Lake desktop CPUs are almost with us, going by rumors, and the prevalence of leaks backs up this notion – with a few fresh pieces of spillage joining the recent flood, one of which will cause some concern.

Much of this comes in the form of leaked presentation slides purportedly from Intel (from press briefings that are supposedly underway), and it’s the gaming-related material that’ll doubtless cause a stir. As always with all this, let’s be cautious – as with any leak (though this one appears genuine enough).

This first slide, shared on X by leaker @wxnod, shows that the flagship for Arrow Lake, the Core Ultra 9 285K, is actually going to be slightly slower than the current  Core i9-14900K flagship when it comes to running PC games.

The difference is marginal – an average of 264 frames per second (fps) for the 14900K versus 261 fps for the 285K, which is nothing you’d ever notice – but the point is that you’d expect a marked uplift (or at least some increase) with a new generation of silicon from Intel.

There is an upside here, though, namely that the Core Ultra 9 285K delivers that same performance using a good deal less power – 447W versus 527W for the Raptor Lake Refresh flagship, so that’s about 15% more power-efficient (this is the total power usage for the PC, we should note – so the figure for just the chips will show a bigger generational leap than this, too).

In another slide, Intel further demonstrates that the Core Ultra 9 285K chugs a good deal less power than the Raptor Lake Refresh flagship, with consumption dropping by up to 165W compared to the 14900K, with gaming frame rates roughly even (there’s some give and take, and the Arrow Lake CPU is faster in some games, slower in others).

More gaming comparisons are provided with the Core Ultra 9 285K stacked up against the Ryzen 7950X3D, the current top-end of 3D V-Cache processors from AMD. This is a roughly even battle, but the 7950X3D wins out slightly, although the Arrow Lake flagship certainly comes out on top with the productivity benchmarks.

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