Intel Core Ultra 9 285K smashes PassMark record to become single-thread performance champ

The Intel Core Ultra 9 285K is the new flagship in Intel's upcoming Arrow Lake desktop CPU line-up, which is expected to be announced and unveiled this week. As part of the company's Core Ultra Series 2 lineup, the Core Ultra 9 285K is essentially the Core i9-15900K.

Although you need several benchmarks carried out across a range of workloads to gauge CPU performance, that hasn't stopped the official PassMark Software account from taking to X to announce that the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K is now the single-thread CPU performance leader after posting a score that is 8.2% higher than the unlocked Core i9-14900KS and around 11% higher than the Core i9-14900K and AMD Ryzen 9950X.

The post mentions that the result "might" come from a pre-release engineering sample, so the results could be higher once the new Intel flagship is released and in the hands of reviewers.

The PassMark result also confirms some of the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K's specs: it's a 24-core, 24-threaded processor with a boost clock speed of up to 5.7 GHz. Interestingly, the boost clock speed is lower than the Intel Core i9-14900KS's 6.2 GHz; however, that CPU is notorious for pushing power draw to the absolute limit.

Based on rumors and leaks, the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K is the flagship CPU in the "Arrow Lake" Core Ultra 200 line-up for desktops. It has 24 cores, divided into 8 P-cores and 16 E-cores, 24 threads, and 76MB of total cache. It's expected to feature a TDP of between 125W and 250W.

• Read more: Intel confirms Core Ultra 200 series CPUs launching October 10: reviews arrive 2 weeks later
• Read more: Here's what the leaked Intel Core Ultra 9 285K 'Arrow Lake' CPU packaging looks like
• Read more: Intel's next-gen Core Ultra 7 265K 'Arrow Lake-S' engineering sample spotted
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