Intel Core Ultra 9 285H Arrow Lake CPU Crushes 185H In Single-Threaded Benchmark Leak

If you read that headline and thought, "hey wait, isn't the 285 already out," then you forgot to look at the letter. The Core Ultra 9 285H is an unannounced mobile processor from Intel based on the Arrow Lake architecture. Intel hasn't said anything about mobile Arrow Lake yet, but the first benchmark leak has appeared in the Geekbench database, and it's dominating Intel's last-gen parts.

We make that statement based on a comparison of the leaked score against Geekbench's official scores for the top-end Core Ultra 9 185H. The Geekbench official scores are based on a collection of curated results from the user-submitted Geekbench benchmarks, and they put the Core Ultra 9 185H at 2241 points in single-core and 11948 points in multi-core.


By comparison, this Dell Pro Max 16 machine with a Core Ultra 9 285H is absolutely smashing those results, and in fact putting up some of the highest scores we've ever seen for a laptop. In our own Geekbench 6 testing, our fastest single-core score was 2857, from a Snapdragon X Elite chip, but that same part's multi-core score was "only" 15112, while the Core Ultra 9 285H in this leak outstrips that result, scoring 15330.

The single-threaded result of 2665 isn't record-breaking, but it does put this part in the same ballpark as many other fast CPUs, including Intel's own Lunar Lake processors as well as AMD's Ryzen 9 and Apple's M3 chips—at least, when all of those parts are tested on wall power. We don't know if this machine was tested on battery or on wall power, but given the high multi-core score we're inclined to think it was plugged-in.


The chip has an interesting configuration, assuming Geekbench read the data correctly; it seems to have six Lion Cove P-cores and ten Skymont E-cores, giving it a total of sixteen logical cores thanks to the lack of Hyper-Threading. Ten E-cores is an unusual setup considering that they are typically arranged in quad-core clusters. It's possible that two of the E-cores are LP-E-Cores, like on Meteor Lake, but Geekbench doesn't differentiate between the two.

Intel's first desktop Core Ultra processors were pretty disappointing almost all the way around, but they did indeed deliver on improved efficiency over last generation. It may be the case that Arrow Lake is much more competitive in laptops thanks to that improved efficiency. We expect we'll find out around CES, when Intel is likely to launch these CPUs.