Intel Arrow Lake flagship CPU estimated to be up to 21% faster than Core i9-13900K

Intel's Arrow Lake-S flagship processor is already being sampled internally and to some of the company's closest industry partners. As such, Intel has shared the first performance projections of this chip, comparing it to the Core i9-13900K and the upcoming “Raptor Lake Refresh” flagship CPU (probably named i9-14900K).

First, while the “Raptor Lake Refresh” family sees core-count increases across the board for Core i3, Core i5, and Core i7 brand extensions, the 14th Gen Core i9 series is widely expected to pack the same core configuration as the i9-13900K with higher clocks (100–300 MHz). The performance projection graphs shared by Igor'sLAB corroborate that theory, as the supposed i9-14900K is only up to 4% faster.

Image credit: Igor'sLAB

As for the Arrow Lake-S processor used in this comparison, it has the same core configuration as the i9-13900K. Since this is a projection, it does not represent the final core configuration of Arrow Lake-S, but it gives a rough idea of the gains it brings over the previous generation, as all the CPUs in this comparison have the same power restrictions and core configurations. As seen in the graphs, the Arrow Lake-S chip is expected to outperform the i9-13900K by 6% to 21%. For this projection, CrossMark, SYSmark 25, WebXPRT 4, Chrome Speedometer 2.1, Geekbench 5.4.5 ST/MT, and various SPECrate2017 CPU benchmarks were used.

Also worth mentioning is the jump in the graphics score. While the Raptor Lake refresh sees zero gains in this section, the Arrow Lake-S CPU is expected to offer more than double the performance, at least according to 3DMark Time Spy and Wild Life Extreme Unlimited. Those gains should be related to the integration of the new Xe-LPG-based iGPU with 8 Xe cores (128 EUs).

With Intel likely to conclude 2023 with the “Raptor Lake Refresh” in Q4-2023 on the LGA1700 platform, all eyes are on 2024. With Meteor Lake likely skipping desktops, Arrow Lake should be the next desktop platform after the Raptor Lake refresh. Leaked roadmap slides showed “Arrow Lake-S” with a mid-2024 mass-production start date, indicating a late 2024 launch.

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KitGuru says: The biggest improvement with Arrow Lake-S over Raptor Lake seems to be the iGPU. However, most people care more about the CPU performance uplift. Based on these estimations, it's not too shabby, but there's a chance that these numbers aren't telling us the whole story, for better or worse.

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