Intel’s flagship Arrow Lake could be significantly slower than the Core i9-14900K – but don’t rule this CPU out just yet
Intel’s next-generation Arrow Lake desktop processors will have their max boost speed capped at 5.7GHz, significantly slower than the current Core i9-14900K, according to the latest news.
So, as always, treat this with some caution, but as Video cardz noted, the rumor aired on X by regular leaker OneRaichu – not visible to the general public on the social media site, but (although contributed by Vector is) – is that we’re going to see that 5.7GHz top boost on a single core, and 5.4GHz on all cores.
Of course, these are the apparent clock speeds for the flagship Core Ultra 9 285K’s core performance cores, but it’s worth stressing that the leaker’s wording is somewhat open to interpretation, so adding a bit of extra oomph seems sensible.
As for the efficiency cores, the theory is that Intel will opt for a 4.7GHz boost speed and a 4.6GHz speed for all cores.
Analysis: Clock speeds aren’t everything – far from it
If true – and we’re honestly not so sure about this, but we certainly can’t dismiss it out of hand – it would mean that Intel’s next flagship would be 300MHz slower than the 14900K with its performance cores, and 300MHz faster with efficiency cores. Indeed, the 14900K hits 5.7GHz on all-core boost, compared to just a single core for the 285K.
This isn’t a surprising development, though. It’s been rumored that Intel plans to throttle clocks with Arrow Lake as the company looks to make more efficient, lower-power desktop processors. (A weakness that Raptor Lake and its subsequent refresh have come under fire for – not to mention all the controversy surrounding the stability of Core i9s in that CPU series as of late.)
The thing to remember is that each new processor generation isn’t just about raw clock speeds, but also about architectural and design improvements, cache loadouts, and other hardware fine-tuning that Intel has implemented. Of course, it would be foolish to think that Intel won’t come up with some sort of significant generational uplift for Arrow Lake, since that is fully expected (there are plenty of rumors pointing in that direction, it must be said).
Indeed, with the efficiency cores being bumped up to 300MHz, this should also help to significantly improve multi-threaded performance. Hopefully we get some robust performance improvements from silicon that runs cooler, consumes less power than Intel’s current generation of chips – and some worthy new contenders for our best CPU list. Just as importantly – more importantly, in fact – Team Blue should shake off the specter of the crashing issues plaguing Core i9 CPUs that we mentioned.
Intel’s Arrow Lake CPUs could hit the market in October, according to the latest speculation, after an initial reveal in September.