Intel did the unthinkable with its new Arrow Lake CPUs

It finally happened. Intel killed Hyper-Threading on its desktop CPUs. The new Arrow Lake range, called Core Ultra 200S, ditches the simultaneous multi-threading (SMT) feature that Intel has held onto for more than a decade. And according to Intel, it doesn’t need the extra threads to still deliver a generational performance improvement, even up against the best processors.

Intel says the new range, which we break down in detail in our post focused its gaming potential, can deliver an 8% performance improvement in single-threaded workloads over the previous generation, and a 4% uplift compared to the Ryzen 9 9950X. Those are pretty small margins, but the real impressive stuff comes in multi-threaded performance.

In multi-threaded performance, Intel says its new Core Ultra 9 285K delivers 15% higher performance than the last-gen Core i9-14900K, and 13% higher performance than AMD’s new Ryzen 9 9950X. That may not sound huge, but it is. Intel is delivering higher performance with 24 threads than AMD can deliver with 32, at least according to Intel’s own numbers. Moreover, Intel says it can deliver this performance while cutting power demands by up to 58%, as you can see in the chart below.

Arrow Lake is a big departure for Intel, but we already know quite a bit about how the processors work. They use the same Skymont and Lion Cove designs as Intel’s new Lunar Lake laptop CPUs, which we first saw in the Zenbook S 14. The architecture is the same, but Intel is bumping the core counts, feeding more power to them, and squeezing out higher clock speeds — up to 5.7GHz on the Core Ultra 9 285K.

Breaking out to more productivity apps, Intel says the Core ultra 9 285K will trade blows with the Ryzen 9 9950X, just with fewer threads. Video workflows will massively benefit from the new chips, however, showing up to a 7.3x improvement, according to Intel. That’s particularly due to support for Sony’s new 4K and 8K XAVC codecs. Intel says Arrow Lake chips are the first desktop CPUs to support the new codec.

Even a year ago, it was unthinkable that Intel would abandon the SMT feature that it spearheaded, but here we are. And based on Intel’s numbers, killing Hyper-Threading might’ve been the best choice, at least for productivity apps. We won’t know for sure until the processors arrive on October 24.