Intel Core Ultra 9 285K "Arrow Lake" Performance On Linux Has Improved A Lot Since Launch
Across a span of nearly 400 benchmarks, when taking the geometric mean of all the benchmarks with the newest system BIOS and Ubuntu 25.04 yielded a 6% improvement on average. A nice improvement overall in the roughly half-year since the Intel Core Ultra Series 2 "Arrow Lake" desktop processors debuted.
Equally exciting was seeing slightly lower CPU power use on average than during the tests for launch-day but also the peak CPU usage significantly higher now than at launch, either due to the newer system BIOS and/or Linux kernel behavior differences.
There were many workloads enjoying significantly better performance on the updated software stack due to proper task placement on Ubuntu 25.04 with Linux 6.14. For gaming tests, web browser workloads, and various other single/lightly-threaded workloads saw great improvements with the fresh run thanks to properly being placed on the Core Ultra 9 285K's P cores rather than E cores. Even outside of those instances, there were a number of other nice performance gains to enjoy when running Ubuntu 25.04 on Arrow Lake.
Those wishing to dig through all the nearly 400 raw benchmarks in full can go dig through all of the data via this result file. Overall it's very healthy gains made over the past half year for Intel Arrow Lake on Linux. Competitive benchmarks and other comparison numbers (i.e. AMD Zen 5 impact over its lifetime) for putting these Ubuntu 25.04 numbers into more perspective will be coming up on Phoronix shortly.
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