Despite all of AMD’s inroads in recent years with Zen desktop CPUs, Intel has largely managed to maintain one important edge against its long-time rival: gaming performance. For those who want to squeeze out every possible frame in the latest AAA games, the company’s latest Core 5/7/9 often outperform their AMD counterparts. Historically, however, that performance has come at the expense of energy efficiency and thermals. The best 13th generation Intels are absolutely power hungry beasts. That has reduced their appeal, especially as small PC builds have become more popular.
On Thursday, Intel detailed the long-awaited Arrow Lake processors, announcing five new models that will arrive on October 24. With the new CPUs, Intel promises a paradigm shift. Compared to the previous generation of Raptor Lake chips, the company said its goal was to reduce power consumption by 40 percent and the internal temperature of the package to 10 degrees Celsius. Judging by the benchmarks Intel shared ahead of today’s announcement, the company is doing just that.
Intel’s new flagship, the Ultra 9 285K, features a 24-core CPU design that includes eight ‘Lion Cove’ cores and 16 ‘Skymont’ cores, along with a clock boost which is 5.7GHz. It, alongside the rest of the current Arrow Lake family, comes with a neural processing unit (NPU), a first for one of Intel’s desktop CPUs. But those specs aren’t all that interesting about the 285K and its siblings.
In “light-threaded” tasks, including tasks like Zoom calls and select Cinebench benchmarks, Intel recorded 285K drawing 58 percent less power than the 14900K, the company’s 14th generation flagship. When it comes to gameplay, the results are even more interesting. In Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2for example, Intel said it saw the 285K run a game an average of 4% faster, while drawing 165W less power. Even in the most GPU intensive games like Dark Legend: Wukong, The 285K offers promising performance gains, with Intel noting that it saw the CPU draw 34 fewer watts of total system power compared to the 14900K.
That efficiency improvement translates into an equally impressive thermal gain, with Intel noting its specs show a 285K run, on average, about 13 degrees Celsius cooler than the 14900K during game loading. The new processor even offers similar gaming performance when users limit its power draw from Intel’s default of 250W to 175W or 125W. For those interested in undermining their CPU or planning to go with an ITX case and motherboard for their next build, good news.
“I think it’s safe to say that this is a major turning point for our desktop portfolio,” said Robert Halleck, general manager of Intel’s AI and Technical Marketing units. “I hope your test will match the numbers we’re talking about today.”
On paper, Arrow Lake is exactly what Intel needs to get it back on track; it’s the most efficient family of desktop processors the company has released in a long time. However, whether that alone will be enough to turn around Intel’s fortunes is unclear.
In the short term, the company is facing a competitor AMD that is more competitive than ever. In the long run, it’s hard to say how much of Arrow Lake’s efficiency should be attributed solely to Intel developers. As recently as 2022, the company has maintained that it will build new processors using a combination of its 20A manufacturing process and TSMC’s 3-nanometer technology. But Intel then recorded a loss of $1.6 billion in Q2 of this year and said it would cut more than 15,000 jobs in an effort to cut costs by $10 billion. Part of that plan involves fully outsourcing Arrow Lake’s production to a third party. At the time, Intel did not directly name TSMC. However, the list of companies capable of producing silicon at the scale and scale required at Arrow Lake is very short. With Intel reportedly hitting the latest snag to clear the next-generation 18A process, it’s clear the company still has a long way to go.
When the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K arrives on October 24, it will cost $589. For those looking for a more affordable entry into Intel’s Arrow Lake ecosystem, the company will also offer the 14-core Ultra 5 245KF for $294 and the 20-core Ultra 7 265K for $394. Alongside its KF siblings, which come without an integrated Intel Xe GPU, the 265K looks like it will be the dark horse of Intel’s Arrow Lake line. The company said the 265K runs about 15 degrees cooler than the 14900K and draws up to 188W of system power.
Alongside its new Arrow Lake processors, Intel has also shared more information about its upcoming Arrow Lake H laptops, which the company says will arrive early next year.
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