The leaks and rumors surrounding Intel's upcoming Arrow Lake desktop CPU line-up are starting to heat up, with recent rumors tipping the existence of the Core Ultra 9 285K as the top-end chip in the upcoming launch. A new set of Geekbench 6 scores spotted by BenchLeaks on X, however, suggests the Core Ultra 9 285 non-K variant of this CPU might lag its Ryzen 9 counterparts significantly.

The Geekbench 6 test results, which were apparently achieved on an ASUS Prime Z890-P motherboard, reveal performance that falls short of even the current-generation AMD Ryzen 7 9700X, never mind any of the Ryzen 9 variants. The Geekbench 6 multicore score came in at an unimpressive 14,150, while the single-core score was a mere 3,081, falling short of the likes of the AMD Ryzen 7 9700X, which scored up to 19,381 and 3,624 in multi- and single-core tests, respectively. However, there appears to be more to this story—namely an odd test configuration that could heavily skew the test results, since the "stock" Intel Core Ultra 9 285K scores significantly higher in the Geekbench 6 charts than this particular 285 seems to.Apparent engineering samples of the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K that made it onto the Geekbench 6 charts have registered multicore scores as high as 21,447, which puts the K-SKU CPU with the same core layout and very similar clock speeds significantly ahead. Digging into the results a little, it appears that the ASUS test platform powering the Core Ultra 9 285 CPU only had 8 GB of DDR5 RAM running at 5586 MT/s, while Core Ultra 9 285K tests that scored much higher had up to 32 GB of DDR5 RAM running at up to 5598 MT/s.

That said, the listed base clock speeds of the Core Ultra 9 285's E-cores are also significantly lower than those of the top-scoring Core Ultra 9 285K, at just 2.5 GHz, compared to the 285K's 3.7 GHz base frequency. This could also explain some of the discrepancy.

Geekbench isn't known to be very RAM-dependent, with the benchmark's largest working set being on the order of 1.6 GB, so there may be some validity to this benchmark score, however it wouldn't be surprising to see the CPU perform significantly better in subsequent benchmarks. At the very least, this Geekbench score validates previous rumors about the expected hardware configuration of the Intel Core Ultra 9 285 and 285K CPUs:

• 8 P-cores
• 16 E-cores
• 24 threads
• Base clock: 2.5 GHz (P-core base clocks will likely be higher)
• Boost clock: 5.586 GHz (likely only for the P-cores)