Intel's next-gen Core Ultra 9 385K performance leaks: up to 10% faster than 285K in gaming

Intel's next-gen Core Ultra 300 series "Arrow Lake Refresh" CPUs are coming later this year, with leaks on the flagship Core Ultra 9 385K processor being around 5-10% faster in gaming.

The performance leaks are from Moore's Law is Dead, where in his latest video he said that Intel's new Arrow Lake Refresh processors won't be Zen 6 competitors for AMD, but will beat the current fleet of Zen 5 chips, but won't beat the Zen 5 + X3D processors like the Ryzen 7 9800X3D and 9950X3D.

Intel will reportedly be increasing clock speeds with aims for 6.0GHz (up from 5.7GHz on Arrow Lake) while there will be "quite a bit" of an increase to the ring bus clock speeds, and plans to increase the die-to-die clocks to eliminate bottlenecks that were seen in Arrow Lake.

With these improvements of 6.0GHz+ clock speeds and increased clocks to the ring bus and die-to-die clocks, the flagship Core Ultra 9 385K processor should be around 5-10% faster in gaming. AMD has higher core counts on its Zen 5 chips as it is, with 16C/32T on offer with the Ryzen 9 9950X and then the same 16C/32T but with 3D V-Cache with the 9950X3D. Both of which will whip Arrow Lake Refresh ass in multi-threaded workloads, and in gaming thanks to the X3D cache.

Arrow Lake Refresh CPUs will be faster than Arrow Lake, but they'll be keeping the same TDP, with MLID noting that we could see a surprise last-minute change to 300W, but doubts that. 300W with the Core Ultra 9 385K would allow for some higher clock speeds, and increased attention from professional overclockers and enthusiasts, but the 120W TDP on the 9800X3D would still probably beat it.

Intel wouldn't want to have a super-hot, super-power-hungry CPU to not even beat AMD's current-gen X3D chips. Keeping the TDP where it is now, is high enough, as you can run high-end AMD processors with a decent air cooler. Higher-end Intel CPUs with overclocking thrown into the mix means you typically need to move towards using an AIO cooler to keep temps under control.