A new benchmark has surfaced on Geekbench showcasing Intel's upcoming mobile Core Ultra 9 285H in action. Initial scores put it a smidgeon behind Lunar Lake in terms of single-core performance. Against Meteor Lake, the CPU manages to pull ahead by 19% at roughly the same power envelope, giving us cause for some optimism.
Intel's new Core naming schematic has some weird nuances. To keep things short, any CPU without the "Ultra" moniker is equipped with Raptor Lake / Alder Lake silicon. Hence, the Core Ultra 9 285H is part of the Arrow Lake-H family and should feature a TDP of 45W.
Spotted in the upcoming Dell Pro Max 16 (MC16250) laptop, the Core Ultra 9 285H offers 16 cores (six P + eight E + two LPE) and 16 threads. The laptop hosts 64GB of DDR5-6400 memory - one of the highest speeds we've seen for SODIMMs, assuming the laptop doesn't use LPDDR5 memory. The CPU achieved a maximum clock speed of 5.4 GHz, just 100 MHz shy of the desktop Core Ultra 7 265K.
The Core Ultra 9 285H managed to score 2,665 and 15,330 points in the single-core and multi-core categories, respectively. Don't get us wrong - the performance is acceptable at roughly 19% faster than the Core Ultra 9 185H from the last generation but fails to match Lunar Lake's Core Ultra 9 288V (30W). The worst part is that the Core Ultra 9 288V scores higher at just 5.1 GHz, meanwhile, the 285H pushes upwards of 5.4 GHz so something is clearly wrong with this benchmark.
Since we are unaware of the operating environment and temperature, it is not possible to draw any judgments yet. Case in point - the leaked 65W Core Ultra 9 285 non-K scored 3,247 points (single core) landing it 21% faster than the 285H. Hence, this is likely an engineering sample or a result of poor testing conditions.
Nonetheless, we expect this CPU to come paired with an RTX 40, maybe even an RTX 50 laptop GPU in gaming notebooks next year. Despite the initial disappointment, Arrow Lake scales pretty well at lower power limits so there is a lot of room for improvement. Intel is rumored to announce its Core Ultra 200H/HX/S non-K CPUs at CES 2025, or in just two months.
