More evidence is mounting about clock speeds for Intel Arrow Lake CPUs, and it looks as though the company is taking a much more conservative approach to megahertz with its forthcoming desktop processors. According to the latest leak, the new Intel Core Ultra 9 285K boost clock is significantly lower than that of its current two flagship 14th gen CPUs, which are currently struggling with stability problems in a number of games.
While the Core i9 14900K is Intel’s best gaming CPU when it comes to raw multi-threaded performance, it runs at a sky high turbo boost clock speed of 6GHz, which not only makes it run hot, but also requires a lot of power to ensure it regularly hits that frequency. Reports of game crashes on Intel CPUs from this generation are also widespread. With its latest top-end chip, however, Intel is seemingly happy to run it at a lower clock speed, even when it’s boosting.
This latest leak comes from regular Intel tech leaker OneRaichu, who has put up a cryptic post on X (formerly Twitter) that looks very much like it reveals the clock speeds for the new Core Ultra 9 285K. The post simply says, “For the top SKU, 57/4-47/6,” and we’re going to assume that the “top SKU” in question here is the new flagship of the Intel Arrow Lake range, which is widely rumored to be called the Core 9 Ultra 285K.
That “57” suggests that the maximum boost clock for the chip’s P-Cores in lightly-threaded workloads will be 5.7GHz, dropping to 5.4GHz when all cores are engaged. We assume that the “47” refers to the boost clock of the power-efficient E-Cores in the chip being 4.7GHz, although, given that the E-Cores are only engaged in multi-threaded workloads, it’s unclear what the “6” means here.
As a point of comparison, the Core i9 14900K has a top turbo boost clock of 6GHz, while the top-end Core i9 14900KS boosts to up to 6.2GHz, as long as you have a cooling system that can cope with it. Interestingly, though, both these CPUs have lower E-Core clock speeds than the 4.7GHz potentially mooted in OneRaichu’s post. It may well be that Intel’s new CPUs have more potent multi-threaded performance as a result.
Of course, none of this has been confirmed by Intel, and this is our reading of a cryptic post, so take this with a pinch of salt right now, but this isn’t the first time Intel has been rumored to be winding down clock speeds on its new top-end chip. An earlier Intel clock speed rumor pointed to the Core Ultra 9 285K’s clock speed being 12% lower than that of the Core i9 14900KS, putting it at around 5.53GHz.
In the meantime, the AMD Ryzen 9000 release date is coming up soon, which will put more competitive pressure on Intel when it finally releases its new Arrow Lake CPUs. Check out our AMD Zen 5 guide to see what we expect from these new processors.
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