Boosted clock speeds for Intel Core 9 Ultra ‘Arrow Lake-S’ processor revealed

Official Press Release

Intel’s Core Ultra “Arrow Lake-S” desktop processors are expected to debut later this year, bringing the new Lion Cove P core, along with Skymont E cores, to the desktop platform. Engineering samples with specs close to retail chips are already appearing to be in the hands of PC OEMs and motherboard vendors, and given the amount of leaks in recent days, Jaykihn0, one of the most influential sources for these leaks, has revealed some interesting details about the maximum boost frequencies of these chips.

The QS for the Core Ultra 9 “Arrow Lake-S” SKU, likely the top-end model that will succeed the current Core i9-14900K, is described as a maximum P-core boost frequency of 5.70GHz, and an all-P-core boost frequency of 5.40GHz. The maximum E-core boost frequency, which is also the all-E-core boost frequency, will be 4.60GHz. The “Skymont” cores and E-cores are named “Lunar Lake,” albeit arranged along a ring bus, and share L3 cache, unlike “Lunar Lake,” where the P-cores have their own exclusive L3 cache, and the E-cores are arranged in a low-power island, with a SoC tile fabric connecting the two.

We know from Intel’s deep dive into Lunar Lake that the company is claiming a 14% IPC gain for Lion Cove over the previous generation Redwood Cove P-cores in Meteor Lake. Considering that Redwood Cove cores have been tested in the real world to deliver roughly the same IPC as the Raptor Cove P-cores that power Raptor Lake, if Intel’s IPC claims for Lion Cove are accurate, the P-cores of Arrow Lake-S at 5.70GHz should be 14% faster than Raptor Cove. It’s worth noting here that Lion Cove cores lack Hyper-Threading, but Arrow Lake-S has 8, and gaming is largely unaffected by the lack of SMT/HTT if the core count is as high as 8.

Another interesting factor that could impact gaming performance is the Arrow Lake-S cache subsystem. Each Lion Cove P core on the 9 Core Ultra Arrow Lake-S is expected to have 3MB of dedicated L2 cache, and the eight P cores share 36MB of L3 cache with the four Skymont core clusters. Thread Director tends not to schedule game workloads to the E cores unless there are specific game optimizations that use them (e.g. to handle game physics, audio signal providers, network stack, etc.).

Intel has promised a huge jump in IPC for the Skymont E-cores over the current Gracemont, with the company claiming an IPC similar to that of the Raptor Lake P-core. Naturally, there are a few Skymont boost cores, not nearly as many as the Raptor Cove P-cores, and even in the top-end Core Ultra 9 SKU, the E-core’s maximum boost frequency is also 4.60GHz. The SPECrate2017 benchmark is also one that Intel doesn’t use memory extensively in its IPC calculations;

Overall, the Core 9 Ultra “Arrow Lake-S” component at these frequencies looks set to challenge AMD’s leading gaming performance crown, which it has held for 16 months (since the launch of the Ryzen 7 7800X3D in April 2023). The bragging rights are selling the fastest gaming processor.

sources: TechPowerUp, VideoCardz