New leak shows the Intel Core Ultra 7 251HX beating the Core i9 14900HX in Cinebench

Intel recently expanded its Arrow Lake-HX lineup by quietly launching the Core Ultra 7 251HX. This uniquely-named CPU was first spotted in some gaming laptop listings before Intel made its product page available on ARK. The CPU sits between the Core Ultra 5 245HX and the Ultra 7 255HX, so it is a mid-range Arrow Lake-HX chip for performance-focused mobile devices.

Under the hood, the 251HX packs 18 cores in a 6P+12E configuration, two fewer than its bigger sibling, the 255HX. As far as performance goes, a recent leak showed the Core Ultra 7 251HX going up against the Core i9 14900HX and the Core Ultra 7 255HX in a Cinebench R23 run. The results are rather interesting and require some interpretation.

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Per the leak from @realVictor_M on X (formerly Twitter), the Core Ultra 7 251HX delivered nearly 30,000 points in the multi-threaded Cinebench R23 test, almost matching the result of the Core i9-14900HX. The latter is a 24-core CPU with an 8P+16E configuration and hyperthreading, bringing the thread count to 32. The fact that the Core Ultra 7 251HX can match the multi-threaded Cinebench R23 score of the 14900HX while having 6 fewer cores is astonishing.

However, the victory is compounded by the fact that the 251HX is much more efficient than its older Raptor Lake Refresh counterpart. When the chip is operating under 100W, the efficiency gap between the two CPUs is staggering. The 251HX crosses the 20,000 point mark at merely 50W, while the 14900HX requires around 60W to do the same. At 70W, the 251HX crosses 25,000 points, while the 14900HX is still hovering around 22,000.

The performance numbers eventually converge around 100W, and both CPUs deliver roughly the same results by the end of the cycle. However, the 251HX is much more efficient during the first half of the run, which can translate to substantial power savings under heavy workloads. The leaked Cinebench R23 benchmark also included the Core Ultra 7 255HX, which handily beat both the 251HX and the 14900HX, as expected.

However, we can only interpret so much from a single test result. We have to wait for these Arrow Lake-HX processors to be integrated into laptops before independent third-party benchmarks can reveal the full picture.