Intel Core Ultra 9 285K "Arrow Lake" Delivers Strong Linux Performance
When taking the geometric mean of nearly 400 benchmarks tested across these processors, the Core Ultra 9 285K was 12% faster than the Core i9 14900K overall. Or about 14% faster when switching to DDR5-8000 memory. This put the Core Ultra 9 285K right inline with the performance of the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X prior generation process overall or around 95% the performance of the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X or 84% the speed of the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X for this wide mix of workloads tested under Linux.
The generational Raptor Lake to Arrow Lake performance is more impressive when factoring in power use. The Core Ultra 9 285K on average was at around 136 Watts during the entire span of workloads tested, right inline with the average of 137 Watts on the Ryzen 9 9950X and much lower than the 156 Watt average with the Core i9 14900K. The Core Ultra 9 285K did have a peak recorded power use at 248 Watts, above the 201 Watts found with the Ryzen 9 9950X but at least much lower than the 347 Watt peak with the i9-14900K. The power efficiency improvements with Arrow Lake are real.
The few Linux gaming tests showed the performance regressing compared to the Core i9 14900K but with much better power efficiency. Across various other workloads was decent generational improvements in raw performance for areas like code compilation, some HPC tasks in cases where AVX-512 isn't utilized, and various other creator and developer workloads. The 24 physical cores with the Core Ultra 9 285K was enough to outperform the 32-thread Ryzen 9 9950X in many code compilation tasks, some MPI workloads, and more, but in areas leveraging AVX-512 like AI and many creator workloads, the AMD Ryzen 9 9900 series continued to dominate.
At pricing of $589~599 USD for the Core Ultra 9 285K, this top-end Arrow Lake desktop processor is around $100 less than the current pricing on the Ryzen 9 9950X. This is a compelling difference such as for a developer/build box and areas where the Core Ultra 9 285K was particularly very competitive but if running a lot of AVX-512 workloads and areas where Zen 5 was delivering striking wins, the Ryzen 9 9950X and the ~$429 Ryzen 9 9900X can deliver great value.
Depending upon the individual benchmark, in some areas the Core Ultra 9 285K was enjoying nice uplift out of the DDR5-8000 memory rather than DDR5-6400. More Arrow Lake DDR5 memory benchmarks will be up in the coming days, including with CUDIMM modules.
Tomorrow the Core Ultra 5 245K DDR5-6400/DDR5-8000 benchmarks should be wrapped up. Again, apologies for not having them done in time for this launch day due to being pressed for time due to the initial DDR5 woes on the prior BIOS and only having received the ASUS ROG MAXIMUS Z890 HERO motherboard last Saturday. So far from my Intel Core Ultra 200S testing and the ASUS ROG MAXIMUS Z890 HERO motherboard, the Linux experience on modern distributions like Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is in good shape and ready to deliver competitive performance and enhanced power efficiency. For Linux gamers the Core Ultra 9 285K doesn't look particularly compelling but for developers, (non-AVX-512) creator workloads, and many other multi-threaded productivity workloads there were nice generational improvements over Raptor Lake, really great performance-per-Watt, and competiveness to the AMD Ryzen 9900 series processors.
Thanks to Intel for supplying the Arrow Lake processors and Z890 motherboard to allow for this launch-day Linux analysis.
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