This review is focused on Linux application performance, where Arrow Lake is generally strong. Compared to its predecessor, 14900K, it ends up both faster (barring some outliers) and significantly more power efficient. Compared to Zen 5, however, it is not as impressive: AMD's 9950X comes out ahead in both raw performance and perf-per-watt, especially in workloads that use AVX-512 like CPU inference. Still, 285K does have some wins in tests that can take advantage of its DDR5-8000 memory support, in some single-thread benchmarks like PyBench, and notably in code compilation.
In Windows reviews [1], 285K's performance is even worse, particularly in gaming tests where it is slower than 14900K and 7800X3D (and with AMD soon launching 9800X3D, the gap should become even bigger). Just like Zen 5 on its launch, Arrow Lake seems to suffer from scheduling issues. As the linked review notes, "When pairing Windows 24H2 with Arrow Lake, performance will be terrible—we've seen games running at 50% the FPS vs 23H2". So there's some hope for improvement with future updates, but overall the Windows scheduler looks beyond suboptimal for modern CPUs with complex topology.
The official specifications are more conservative than what is possible with memory overclock profiles like Intel XMP and AMD EXPO. The Phoenix tests show 285K at both DDR5-6400 and DDR5-8000. It is possible to go higher than the official 5600 MT/s with Zen 5 as well, but there is less headroom, with 6400 MT/s being the limit according to TPU [1].
There has to be something wrong with their testing method on the browser benchmarks. What possible reason could there be for the 285K's performance on Speedometer 3.0 to be half what you'd expect? That's not consistent with the performance on any of the other single-threaded tests, and it's not even consistent with the other browser benchmarks.
In Windows reviews [1], 285K's performance is even worse, particularly in gaming tests where it is slower than 14900K and 7800X3D (and with AMD soon launching 9800X3D, the gap should become even bigger). Just like Zen 5 on its launch, Arrow Lake seems to suffer from scheduling issues. As the linked review notes, "When pairing Windows 24H2 with Arrow Lake, performance will be terrible—we've seen games running at 50% the FPS vs 23H2". So there's some hope for improvement with future updates, but overall the Windows scheduler looks beyond suboptimal for modern CPUs with complex topology.
[1] https://www.techpowerup.com/review/intel-core-ultra-9-285k/3...