Intel Arrow Lake-S CPUs Are 21% Faster Than Raptor Lake-S, iGPU Performance Sees a 2.4x Uplift
Igor’s Lab has obtained the performance numbers of Intel’s upcoming Arrow Lake-S desktop processors. These charts are apparently sourced from Intel itself. In any case, a few other sources indicate that these benchmarks are quite new and may be an indicator of the latest developments with Arrow Lake.
Arrow Lake Desktop Tested
The benchmarks feature the i9-13900K, the i9-14900K, and a 24-core / 32-thread CPU based on Arrow Lake. All 3 processors feature the same core/thread counts to give as an idea of the expected performance gains. We are not sure if the aforementioned Arrow Lake SKU is the highest configuration as rumors mention a 40-core variant.
All these charts have been normalized to the i9-13900K for more perspective. Across the board, Raptor Lake Refresh does not score any better than the 13900K. Moving over to Arrow Lake, this lead increases up to 20% in Geekbench 5.4.5 MC. Although, it can also fall back to the single-digit territory, depending on the test.
In a few other benchmarks, the i9-14900K improves its lead to ~4%. On the flipside, the Arrow Lake based 24 core CPU is up to 21% faster than the i9-13900K. That is a modest improvement, however, really disappointing as we’ll explain in a bit.
iGPU Performance Gains
Arrow Lake will make use of the Alchemist architecture for its iGPU, hosted by the Graphics tile. This alone nets an up to 2.4x increase in graphics performance using 3DMark TimeSpy. Now that is really impressive since APUs derived from Arrow Lake can give serious competition to AMD’s G-series processors.
The Takeaway
The community has not taken these new benchmarks lightly. After skipping Meteor Lake and moving from a 7nm-class node to a ~2nm-class process, Intel can barely attain 15% better performance. That is highly disappointing as Bionic_Squash on Twitter mentions that these numbers are legitimate.
We are extremely shocked by these metrics and even if Intel resorts to TSMC’s N3B, the performance uplift should be higher. In any case, the silver lining is the fact that this CPU may not be the highest-end model. We did hear rumors regarding a 40-core beast from Moore’s Law Is Dead, though we cannot verify the reliability of that claim.
Lion Cove will also drop hyperthreading, so these benchmarks may not represent actual real-world performance. Besides, we have more than one year left until we see Arrow Lake in action. We suggest users wait for clarification from other leakers before jumping to conclusions.
Source: Igor’s Lab
