Chipzilla is in the pre-launch period for its next-gen desktop platform, Arrow Lake, which should hit the shops in a few months. It is currently testing different versions of the chip as it moves closer to production, and now a qualification sample chip has allegedly been tested.
However, some results show a surprisingly poor performance compared with its existing Raptor Lake 14900K flagship CPU.
The rumour mill for Arrow Lake has been churning out benchmark numbers for several versions of Intel's upcoming CPUs.
The previous round of benchmarks for Arrow Lake featured numbers for an engineering sample CPU, and they were surprisingly low even for pre-release silicon. Now, the updated numbers for a qualification sample CPU show that performance has improved a lot over the previous CPU but not by much over Raptor Lake.
An X user named Jaykihn has been sharing the benchmark numbers for Arrow Lake, but it's unclear what chip is being tested.
That said, there's good reason to believe it's the 24-core flagship Arrow Lake CPU since it's being compared with the 14900K, which also has 24 cores. This new round of numbers shows Arrow Lake tested at 250W, roughly the same PL2 TDP for Raptor Lake's high-end CPUs, which have a PL2 of 253W.
The numbers show a significant improvement from engineering sample to qualification sample. Still, even with that improvement, Arrow Lake is just 4 per cent faster than Raptor Lake, which is surprising.
The difference could still be down to early silicon and the fact that Arrow Lake will not offer Hyper-Threading, which gives this CPU eight fewer threads overall than the 13900K/14900K.
We expected a lot more from Chipzilla - Arrow Lake was touted as new architecture on a new Intel 20A node, with a new socket, and faster DDR5 memory.
Previous rumours suggested Arrow Lake could offer up to 15 per cent multi-core improvement over Raptor Lake, with a single-core improvement of just five per cent.
Another previous leak involving internal documents from Intel boasted of a 21 per cent improvement for Arrow Lake compared with Raptor Lake in multi-core benchmarks. Given those previous leaks, these latest numbers don't really add up—making this leak quite puzzling.