Intel Core i9-14900KF leak is good and bad news for those hoping for a speedy flagship CPU
Intel’s incoming Core i9-14900KF flagship has been spotted in a leaked benchmark that shows impressive single-core performance, although the multi-threaded result isn’t much of an eye-opener.
If VideoCardz noted, we’ve had a few PassMark results appear for the 14900KF (so not technically the 14900K, but virtually identical – the only difference here is that there is no integrated graphics card with the ‘KF’ model, but that doesn’t affect these results at all, it’s here non relevant) .
The Core i9-14900KF recorded a single-thread result of 4,939 in PassMark – adding some flavor to a leaked benchmark, of course – which is comparable to the 13900K which hits 4,666.
That’s almost 6% faster for the 14900KF, reflecting the higher maximum boost speed that reaches 6GHz out of the box (compared to 5.8GHz for the current flagship Raptor Lake).
For multi-threaded performance, PassMark shows that the 14900KF is pretty much in a dead heat with the 13900K – actually just slightly slower (by about half a percent, so nothing meaningful).
Analysis: Let’s not get carried away (although there are admittedly concerns here)
That’s a slightly strange twist on these results, because while the single-core jump is pretty much what we’d expect – a decent step forward – it seems strange that no multi-threaded improvement is made at all.
This is just one benchmark, and also a leak, so we would do well not to attach too much importance to the results. Additionally, other recent leaks surrounding the Core i9-14900KF have indicated some decent(ish) multi-threaded gains (in Geekbench), so we really have to withhold judgment here. Certainly, we would expect some increase, and none at all, for multi-core.
That said, we’re not expecting big things from Raptor Lake Refresh overall, given the rumblings from the rumor mill about how these 14th-gen desktop processors will be a modest step forward overall.
Another clue in that regard is the lack of Intel each mention of Raptor Lake Refresh at its recent Innovation event, which again seems a bit strange. Team Blue focused entirely on blowing the trumpet for Meteor Lake laptop chips (and their AI capabilities), without even mentioning the desktop side of the next-gen CPU equation. And that doesn’t exactly give us confidence…
That’s pretty telling in our book, considering Raptor Lake Refresh is set to debut next month (around mid-October). Still, based on some of this leak, we can hold out hope for a decent CPU refresh, and there’s always the 14700K which is expected to significantly increase the number of cores (for efficiency cores, by adding four ), and this should give shape to an impressive increase.