Overclocking and Power

The governing idea behind Arrow Lake is to offer generational performance gains along expected lines, but with a leap in energy efficiency from the new tile-based disaggregation, and switch to the new 3 nm foundry node for key logic components of the chip. Conversely, this means that the high efficiency opens up some overclocking headroom.

Arrow Lake introduces a dual base-clock domain architecture. There are now two independent BCLK domains, one for the Compute tile, and the other for the SoC tile. This is crucial in ensuring that BCLK-based overclocking doesn't destabilize other clock domains such as PCIe clock, which will stick to the BCLK domain of the SoC tile.

Next up, Intel added a granularity of 16.67 MHz for the clock speeds of the P-cores and E-cores, letting you fine-tune your overclock that much better. The tile-to-tile fabric has a clock domain of its own, which can either be overclocked with a static frequency setting, or in a ratio with CPU clock speeds. DLVR (digital linear voltage regulator) bypass lets certain premium motherboards override the internal voltage management of the processor with smart discrete voltage regulation controllers for superior OC. Arrow Lake supports V/f curve control on a per P-core and per E-core cluster basis. The processor's SMU can detect low-temperature cooling solutions in an overclocked scenario, and bypass voltage limits as the chip gets cooler. Lastly, "Arrow Lake" offers native support for CUDIMMs and CSODIMMs. These are DDR5 memory modules with CKD (client clock drivers), which clear out the memory signal eyes, allowing for higher frequencies. Some of the newer memory kits with over 8000 MT/s XMP tend to be CUDIMMs.


With the Core i9-14900K as its baseline, Intel claims an up to 165 W whole-system power reduction with the Core Ultra 9 285K, in gaming workloads.


The revamped power management, switch to the newer TSMC 3 nm node (where it matters), and other optimization mean that besides lower power, the average package temperature of the 285K is around 13°C lower than that of the i9-14900K. In lightly threaded use-cases, Intel claims an up to 58% lower package power than the i9-14900K.