Intel Ultra 285K beats Apple M3, AMD 9950X, Qualcomm X Elite in early single-core benchmark

Last month, Intel revealed its Core Ultra 200V CPUs for the mobile and notebook market. It is based on Lunar Lake architecture. Meanwhile, on the desktop front, the company is preparing the Arrow Lake-S processor lineup and the flagship SKU is expected to be Core Ultra 9 285K.

The Ultra 9 285K is expected to be a 24-core 24 thread part (remember that Intel killed hyper-threading or simultaneous multi-threading with Lunar Lake).

What makes flagship parts interesting is the performance and the subsequent halo effect it can create and according to PassMark single-thread test. It looks like Intel is going to emerge victorious in this round, scoring an impressive 5268 points, which is far higher than AMD's Ryzen 9950X which managed 4739.

Thus, the Intel processor was 11.16% faster in this metric making it an impressive showing given that the 9950X is based on AMD's latest Zen 5 architecture and hence both of them are from the same generation.

PassMark, like UserBenchmark, also maintains an online database of various computing products, including CPUs, that help give us an idea of how a product across multiple units performs. However, unlike UserBenchmark, PassMark scores are unbiased and thus provides a fairly good representation of actual real-world performance.

Apple's M3 was also mighty impressive here and if we were to consider power efficiency, it was probably the best overall. The M3 8-core chip is at 4779 points which means it is just slightly slower than the highly-inefficient i9-14900KS and significantly better than AMD's best showing.

Another interesting comparison is with Qualcomm given that the firm also makes Windows desktop CPUs now and was recently rumored to be interested in buying Intel. The Snapdragon X Elite X1E-84-100 SKU is the best from the company with 3958 points. This means it is quite a bit slower than anything from Intel, Apple, or even AMD.

While the single-threaded numbers for the Core Ultra 285K are all good and dandy, it's the multi-threaded performance that is not close to what AMD is delivering with the 16-core 9950X. The Core Ultra 285K has put up 46,872 but it is far lower than the 66,609. If we consider performance for around the same power draw, the 12-core 9900X at 120W TDP is at 54,631 which means the AMD CPU delivers 16.55% more multi-threaded throughput.

Intel is rumoured to launch Arrow Lake-S later this month on October 24th according to HKEPC.