Tuesday, October 8th 2024
Intel's Core Ultra 9 285K Performance Claims Leaked, Doesn't Beat i9-14900K at Gaming
The Chinese tech press is abuzz with slides allegedly from Intel's pre-launch press-deck for the Core Ultra 2-series "Arrow Lake-S." The most sensational of these are Intel's first-party performance claims for the top Core Ultra 9 285K model. There's good news and bad news. Good news first—Intel claims to have made a big leap in energy efficiency with "Arrow Lake," and the 285K should offer gaming performance comparable to the current Core i9-14900K at around 80 W lower power draw for the processor. But then there in lies the bad news—despite claimed IPC gains for the "Lion Cove" P-core, and rumored clock speeds being on par with the "Raptor Cove" P-cores on the i9-14900K, the 285K is barely any faster than its predecessor in absolute terms.
In its first party testing, when averaged across 12 game tests, which we used Google optical translation to make out the titles of, Intel used performance numbers of the i9-14900K as the mean. The 285K beats the i9-14900K in only four games—Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2, Age of Mythology Retold, Civilization VI: Gathering Storm, and F1 23. It's on-par with the i9-14900K in Red Dead Redemption 2, Total War: Pharaoh, Metro Exodus, Cyberpunk 2077, Black Myth: Wukong, Rainbow Six Siege. It's slower than the i9-14900K in Far Cry 6, FF XIV, F1 24, Red Dead Redemption 2. Averaged across this bench, the Core Ultra 9 285K ends up roughly on par with the Core i9-14900K in gaming. Intel also compared the 285K to AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X, and interestingly, even the Ryzen 9 7950X3D.The Ryzen 9 7950X3D isn't AMD's fastest gaming processor (which is the 7800X3D), but Intel chose this so it could compare the 285K across both gaming and productivity workloads. The 285K is shown being significantly slower than the 7950X3D in Far Cry 6 and Cyberpunk 2077. It's on par in Assassin's Creed Shadows and CIV 6 Gathering Storm. It only gets ahead in Rainbow Six Siege. Then there's the all important comparison with the current AMD flagship, the Ryzen 9 9950X "Zen 5." The 9950X is shown being on-par or beating the 285K in 8 out of 12 game tests. And the 9950X is the regular version of "Zen 5," without the 3D V-cache.
All is not doom and gloom for the Core Ultra 9 285K, the significant IPC gains Intel made for the "Skymont" E-cores means that the 285K gets significantly ahead of the 7950X3D in multithreaded productivity workloads, as shown with Geekbench 4.3, Cinebench 2024, and POV-Ray.
Sources:
VideoCardz, Wxnod (Twitter)
In its first party testing, when averaged across 12 game tests, which we used Google optical translation to make out the titles of, Intel used performance numbers of the i9-14900K as the mean. The 285K beats the i9-14900K in only four games—Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2, Age of Mythology Retold, Civilization VI: Gathering Storm, and F1 23. It's on-par with the i9-14900K in Red Dead Redemption 2, Total War: Pharaoh, Metro Exodus, Cyberpunk 2077, Black Myth: Wukong, Rainbow Six Siege. It's slower than the i9-14900K in Far Cry 6, FF XIV, F1 24, Red Dead Redemption 2. Averaged across this bench, the Core Ultra 9 285K ends up roughly on par with the Core i9-14900K in gaming. Intel also compared the 285K to AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X, and interestingly, even the Ryzen 9 7950X3D.The Ryzen 9 7950X3D isn't AMD's fastest gaming processor (which is the 7800X3D), but Intel chose this so it could compare the 285K across both gaming and productivity workloads. The 285K is shown being significantly slower than the 7950X3D in Far Cry 6 and Cyberpunk 2077. It's on par in Assassin's Creed Shadows and CIV 6 Gathering Storm. It only gets ahead in Rainbow Six Siege. Then there's the all important comparison with the current AMD flagship, the Ryzen 9 9950X "Zen 5." The 9950X is shown being on-par or beating the 285K in 8 out of 12 game tests. And the 9950X is the regular version of "Zen 5," without the 3D V-cache.
All is not doom and gloom for the Core Ultra 9 285K, the significant IPC gains Intel made for the "Skymont" E-cores means that the 285K gets significantly ahead of the 7950X3D in multithreaded productivity workloads, as shown with Geekbench 4.3, Cinebench 2024, and POV-Ray.
114 Comments on Intel's Core Ultra 9 285K Performance Claims Leaked, Doesn't Beat i9-14900K at Gaming
Missed that part huh? Oh that's right, gaming is the only metric that matters in a CPU's performance.
It's a win for AMD, for him. Maybe not for you. Nothing wrong with that.
Basically 285K is 14900K with lower power consumption.
i wont be surprised if nvidia follows this trend too :skull:
GBench never matters. If you think it does, and also expect forum members to agree on everything.. well, welcome to the internet. No need for name calling. :laugh:
Imagine Core Ai7 15700K, people would lose their shit, me included.
"Core iX" might have been very old and might have become boring but it's both short, sound and unique. And it makes sense to wide public!
This new naming system will only confuse the buyers which in spite of won't result in better sells.
Edit: ah 80w lower. That’s still pretty crazy power efficiency over what they’ve had.
This is not as if breaking namning converntion after 8700K, that would have been insane.
Right now they have a reputation of selling crazy hot CPU's, and added to that there's hardware degradation as well.
It's not like they want to, I think they have to. Also, five digits is silly.
Unaware buyers: "Welp, it's still Intel." They decided on the name change before going full bozo with heating specifications. I don't mind name changing, I mind changing it to this prematurity. Well, yeah, name change will be some truly remarkable absolution fuel in this case! I have no trouble counting. Might take a little time to say it out loud but not like "Core Ultra 9" contributes to time savings any better than good ol' "Core i9."
Also,
Buyers who love the name: "Welp, it's still Intel."
Buyers who hate the name: "Welp, it's still Intel." No one ever said it was. :rolleyes: Intel dropped Pentium 4/D and AMD dropped FX, water under the bridge. No need to reply here, I'm not comparing the products. Is there a reason for even saying the full name, for end users? Is this a problem or just OCD?
When I see 13600K in a post it's enough info for me.
If you downlock the 14900k to what the 285k is wouldnt it be around the same watts?
if that same thing will be proven by 3rd party reviewers, then it is really a nice thing
Intel and AMD are practically dead even in gaming (1440p/4K) with their respective current generations; Intel has faster cores while AMD makes up for it with loads of L3 cache. AMD is far more energy efficient (which may save you on cooling too), but since the benefits of 3D V-Cache is really a hit and miss, no one knows for sure whether this will continue to scale with future games. But in practice, it's pretty much on par as long as you select one of the higher SKUs from either vendor, especially if you're buying a mid-range GPU anyways. It's not like in the old Bulldozer days, or even Zen 1 days, where you missed out on a lot of performance.
And when it comes to applications, as usual it depends on your use case. Most buyers shouldn't base their purchasing decisions on "average/aggregated performance", and especially not from synthetic benchmarks. Game engines don't scale indefinitely with faster CPUs. If you look at individual games, you'll see some games are already the bottleneck for many current CPUs, so we shouldn't expect faster CPUs to scale significantly further in those games. Eventually we will probably see some games get patched and new games arrive. This is fairly similar to the Skylake-family years; for a while there was a "plateau" in many games with CPUs boosting to ~4.5 GHz.