Flagship Fight: Intel Core Ultra 9 285K Beats AMD Ryzen 9 9950X In Early Benchmarks
In the lead up to Intel's eventual Arrow Lake launch, rumors and leaks are starting to pile up with increased plausibility, as tends to happen the closer we get to a product's official release. The latest source of leaks comes from a familiar source—Geekbench's benchmark database—and it hints that Intel's flagship Arrow Lake processor could take the performance crown.
We say "hints" because the usual caveats apply. Namely, this is but a single set of benchmarks, we didn't run them ourselves (and so we can't comment on platform settings that might affect scoring), and it's a leak (read: not official), which means it's a possible teaser of things to come and nothing more. But let's not be a wet blanket and take a look at what the latest data suggests.
Arrow Lake, if you're unaware, is the codename for Intel's upcoming desktop processors. They'll arrive as Intel's first chips to introduce a tiled architecture to the desktop, plus several other goodies—advanced packaging, new P-core and E-core architectures, and probably a retooled NPU architecture, given all the buzz surrounding all things AI these days.
We recently reported on an Arrow Lake lineup leak that purportedly revealed a whole bunch of upcoming SKUs, complete with core configs, clock speeds, and TDPs. According to that leak, the upcoming Core Ultra 9 285K will take the mantle as Intel's flagship desktop CPU, and that's precisely the chip that has now made an appearance on Geekbench.
Source: Geekbench
Multiple appearances, actually. Based on everything we know so far, the Core Ultra 9 285K will arrive with 8 Lion Cove P-cores and 16 Skymont E-Cores, for a total of 24 cores (and no Hyper Threading). It should have a max boost clock (via Thermal Velocity Boost, or TVB) of 5.7GHz.
Source: Geekbench
Source: Geekbench
The two leaked Geekbench runs provide similar single-core and multi-core scores. If we take the best of the bunch, however, the Core Ultra 9 285K lands at a 3,450 score for single-core performance and 23,024 for multi-core performance.
While we didn't obtain these scores ourselves, we do have a wealth of our own Geekbench 6.3 test data to compare against, the most recent of which is the above graph plucked from our Ryzen 9 9950X review. In our own testing, the Ryzen 9 9950X posted a 3,309 single-core score and 20,508 multi-core score.
The leaked Arrow Lake benchmark runs have the Core Ultra 9 285K scoring up to 4.3% higher in the single-core test, and up to 12.7% higher in the multi-core test. And compared to the Core i9-14900K, the Arrow Lake part is 2.4% and 11.5% higher in the single-core and multi-core tests, respectively.
Obviously this is just a limited glimpse of Arrow Lake's performance at the top end. It's also a positive one, if it stands up, especially considering that performance should improve post-launch with more mature drivers, etc.
