Panther Lake might've taken the spotlight at Intel's CES show floor last month, but the company has had another lineup in the oven for a while now: the now-confirmed Arrow Lake Refresh. Spanning across desktop and mobile, the upcoming 16th Gen CPUs from the Blue Team have already generously leaked, and today, we have yet another Geekbench listing to go over featuring the flagship Core Ultra 9 290K Plus.
The run was conducted on an Asus ROG Strix Z890-E Gaming Wi-Fi motherboard with 64 GB of DDR5-6800 memory. The chip netted 3,535 points in the single-core test, roughly 10.5% higher than its predecessor's 3,200 points. Comparing it to all the entries on Geekbench's processor benchmarks charts, that score actually puts the 290K Plus at the very top.
The multi-core score came out to 25,106 points, cementing an 11.29% lead over the 285K, and putting it past every other consumer Intel chip on Geekbench's database. But since these numbers only represent a single run instead of an average calculated from a large sample size, we can't take them at face value. Disclaimer aside, the results are still impressive.
The Core Ultra 290K Plus will likely serve as the successor to the outgoing Core Ultra 9 285K, mostly through minor clock speed enhancements. As such, rumors hint at the same 24-core (8P+16E) layout and 125W PL1 and 250W PL2 power limits. Leaks indicate E-Core boost has been upped by 200 MHz — from 4.6 GHz to 4.8 GHz — while the P-Core Turbo and Thermal Velocity Boost receive 100 MHz increases each.
We've previously covered the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus' Geekbench escapades as well; that SKU is expected to replace the existing 265K, and the preliminary numbers for it tell a similar story of ~10% better performance. There is no official release date for these chips yet, but Intel has confirmed they're coming with leaks pointing toward a March-April launch. Arrow Lake refresh can be a drop-in upgrade for many, as well, since it will be the company's final release on the current LGA 1851 socket.
Intel has confirmed Arrow Lake Refresh is coming, but it hasn't confirmed any SKUs or expected performance. As is always the case with pre-release benchmarks, we'll need to wait until the chips are available to truly evaluate performance.
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