Leaked Intel Arrow Lake CPU benchmarks show generational performance regression but that might not be the whole story

What with the ongoing 13th and 14th Gen CPU debacle, wouldn't it be nice if Intel had a hot new generation of desktop processors to fix everything. In theory, that would be Arrow Lake, due out later this year.

The problem is, some new leaked benchmarks spotted by X account Benchleaks (via Tom's Hardware) don't exactly paint a stellar picture of Arrow Lake's performance prowess.

The chip in question is the upcoming Intel Core Ultra 7 265KF. It's expected to slot into the range in the same spot as the existing Core i7-14700KF. So, it's a second rung model with the integrated GPU disabled.

But what of those benchmark results? Well, we're talking Geekbench 6, which comes with the usual caveats. Whatever, the leaked numbers for the 265KF are 3,219 single-thread points and 19,433 multi-thread points.

That compares with 3,005 and 19,595 points, respectively, for the Core i7-14700KF (read our review of the similar Core i7 14700K here). Notably, the new Arrow Lake CPU is expected to offer the same eight Performance and 12 Efficient core configuration as the 14700KF.

However, the big difference with Arrow Lake is that it ditches HyperThreading from its Performance cores. That means it drops eight threads from its overall thread processing count versus its predecessor. 

[GB6 CPU] Unknown CPUCPU: Intel Core Ultra 7 265KF (20C 20T)Min/Max/Avg: 5320/5495/5472 MHzCodename: Arrow LakeCPUID: C0662 (GenuineIntel)Single: 3219Multi: 19433https://t.co/oUOhPESaSAAugust 15, 2024

With that in mind, the slight regression in multi-thread performance does make sense. Indeed, it's actually less of a drop than you might expect from the removal of HypperThreading support.

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But if accurate, any actual regression in multi-thread performance, generation-on-generation, is still very disappointing from what is meant to be a pretty major architectural advance.

The other part of the performance equation,