The noise from the grapevine around Intel's Arrow Lake desktop CPUs is now reaching deafening levels - with leak after leak indicating the chips are indeed imminent, as rumored - and now we've caught the (purported) full spec details of the processors.
VideoCardz flagged up an Intel presentation slide aired by leaker HXL on X which is apparently from the Chinese media (after the press were briefed on the Arrow Lake CPUs which has just happened, ahead of their theoretical public revelation on October 10).
As previously rumored, we see that there are five unlocked (K series) models as part of this initial launch.
The specs also fall in line with previous rumblings from the rumor mill, with the flagship chip being the Core Ultra 9 285K which offers 24-cores (8+16 performance/efficiency, with 24-threads as well - none of these CPUs have hyper-threading) and boosts up to 5.7GHz. It has 36MB of Intel Smart Cache and 40MB of L2 cache.
Next up is the Core Ultra 7 265K which is a 20-core (8+12) CPU that boosts up to 5.5GHz, with cache configurations of 30MB and 36MB respectively. This will also have a 265KF variant without integrated graphics.
Then there's the Core Ultra 5 245K - again with a 245KF non-iGPU variant - rounding off the line-up, which sports 14-cores (6+8) and boosts up to 5.2GHz, with 24MB and 26MB cache configurations.
Interestingly, with those max boost speeds, the slide confirms what previous rumors suggested - that Intel has made a telling change here, bringing TVB (Thermal Velocity Boost) into play with all these K processors, even the Core Ultra 5 (Core i5 or i7 chips never had this treatment in the past).
The anticipation is building then, but other leaked presentation slides for Arrow Lake CPUs (also from China) suggest that gamers might be seriously disappointed with the performance on offer, at least from the flagship. If the slides are genuine, the Core Ultra 9 285K won't be any faster than the 14900K for PC gaming - in fact, it'll be just a smidge slower. Productivity and non-gaming usage, mind you, will be a different kettle of benchmarks, as will power-efficiency.
All of this remains speculation, though, we should underline, but at this point, the specs have been pretty consistent from the rumor mill, so it seems quite likely they are on the money. Still, as ever with leaks, there's room for error, but the spilled slides look genuine enough to us (and there's certainly a large helping of them). We don't have long to wait to find out, as Intel's big Core Ultra 200S launch should take place on Thursday.
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