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.
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
Still hoping..
I'm curious to see if 8000-9600 MT/s CUDIMM can help. I also wonder how the NPU will end up being used. Also, wonder if there is overclocking headroom. I wonder if the NPU is overclockable. It is very interesting to me that all the E-cores of the K SKUs are clocked at 4.6 GHz, I wonder why they all clock the same this time, last gen there was a 10% clock increase on E-Cores going from i5 to i9.
Hopefully there is a bit more useful info at the reveal on the 10th.
Seeing how these X3D's have stagnated in price and even gone up a bit, I don't think i'll spend much on this upgrade anyway for a sizeable performance gain.
I don't care for gaming performance as all of these higher end CPU's will give me the exact same performance in the games I play at 1440p wide. Now if I played some of those simulation games where X3D destroys everything, maybe i'd get a few more frames even at this resolution. But I don't play them in recent times and even if I did the difference would be inconsequential.
Density improvements are getting smaller and smaller, chips aren't clocking much faster on new nodes, and efficiency gains have been small as well. Unless backside power and GAA are big improvement for TSMC and Intel we can expect more of the same going forward.
CPU market is competitive, it's just both AMD and Intel failed to impress this time. Shit happens.
I think a fair amount of people would be ok with this launch if they actually bring back meaningful overclocking. That way people that just go for "out-of-box" experience will get a more efficient and cooler CPU, but people who wanted to OC anyway can still get a real improvement with their oversized cooling. 13th gen and 13th-gen-Version2 ("14th" gen) were already so close to maxed out (or even over-volted from the factory apparently) that there really wasn't much to gain from OCing...if anything...unless you had a huge cooling setup and even then, it wasn't wildly different. I'm interested to see what they find in the reviews.
I have no complaints. Gamers are already in a good position with plenty of great options available from both previous and current generations.
Its good to see Intel is efficiency-focused with lower power consumption for similar or marginally better performance. Lets hope they get this one right.
Having said that I'm keen on 265K this gen as I'm not impressed with the X870 MB's. But I have two PC's and may get X3D for one and 265K for the other.So you think 285K is only 67W average? Intel would be screaming that from the top of the roof if Arrow lake was 60% more efficient. It'd be nice if it's 25%+ for similar performance. But at least AMD delivered a solid 6-9% at 40% lower TDP with Zen 5 (excluding 9950X)Leaks are showing Zen 5 X3D to have impressive gains outside of gaming, making it no longer a one trick pony. More cache, hihger clocks, full OCing support. Might be the X3D version that finally interests me as I'm only casual gamer and productivity is more important. Being able to have bonus fps and still strong multi-core performance for apps is a win-win especially if they keep the TDP at same as Zen 4 X3D versions.
Just wondering... any feedback on whether the same applies to the 9900X3D/9950X3D? Or are there any speculations suggesting that AMD has overcome latency issues with more than one CCD? Perhaps 3D-cache available on both CCDs?Yep the Intel naming scheme is annoying. As always it'll take time getting used to. For me "ULTRA" sounds transformer'ishly childish. Then again, I felt the same way about 'SUPER' for graphics cards, but now it seems totally normal. Lets just hope none of these companies think its cool to add "POWER RANGER" to the mix. That will be the end of tech (EMP incoming...)
With coding languages and game engines being more advanced then they were, I actually think we will start to see a shift in gaming whein the parallelism with either the engine, software stack or underlying technology APIs. honestly probably all of them.
If that begins happening more and more we will also likely continue to see the shift to include more cores.
Thats from a gaming perspective, but software parallelism as a whole is evolving at pretty crazy rates.
Hopefully this will reduce expectations and hype though about Arrow lake performance increases, Zen 5 had such a bad reception at launch due to overhype which led to massive disappointment at launch when people saw Zen 5 did not improve as much as they were expecting.