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.