The Intel Core Ultra 5 245K, a budget CPU, blows past more expensive chips in new multi-core benchmark score leaks

There have been plenty of leaks surrounding the Intel Core Lunar Lake series and its capabilities, but a new CPU-Z benchmark result for the Intel Core Ultra 5 245K Arrow Lake desktop processor has leaked, and they’re quite impressive so far.

According to popular Chinese hardware leaker ECSM_Official, the Intel Core Ultra 5 245K scored 850.6 points in the single-core performance and a multi-core score of 10,907.1 points. This puts the Core Ultra 5 245K between the Intel Core i9-13980HX’s 842 points and the Intel Core i5-14600K/KF’s 852 points in terms of single-core performance, or about 99.8% of the performance of the Raptor Lake Refresh chip.

The processor shines in multi-core testing, however, as it beats the 14600K/KF’s 9,868 multi-core score by roughly 10.5%, putting it at 90% of the performance of the higher-end Intel Core i7-14700K, which scored 12,117 points. The 245K doesn’t feature hyperthreading either, so its 14 threads delivering performance similar to chips with 20 and 28 threads is even more impressive.

Though Arrow Lake is in its final stages, there are still plenty of tweaks and changes that can be made right until the processors start rolling off the line. Not to mention that performance leaks could always be outliers due to an incredibly small sample size. So, take these results with a grain of salt until the product launches and is fully tested.

Is hyperthreading really that great?

According to Intel, hyperthreading was dropped to improve the efficiency of its Arrow Lake chips. Judging from the leaked benchmark results, this was the ideal decision. The 245K has a maximum power of 159 watts, compared to the 14600K’s 181 watts, and yet the former nearly matched the latter in a single-core test and bested it in a multi-core test.

Leaker ECSM_Official also noted that the tested 245K processor had not been fully optimized, with a frequency lower by 100 to 200 MHz from the standard. If this is true, then it’s clear that the Intel Core Ultra 5 245K will most likely score even higher benchmark scores once it officially launches.

Hyperthreading is the name of Intel’s tech that allows more than one thread to run on each core in a CPU, meaning that more work can be done in parallel (AMD and ARM have similar tech as well). The idea is that with hyperthreading enabled, a PC is able to process more information in less time and can run more background tasks without any disruption.

However, the fact that removing hyperthreading from the most recent Arrow Lake chips can up the processor performance so drastically calls into question just how useful the tech really is. Most likely the amount of overhead required to implement the tech essentially negates any benefits from it.

It’ll be interesting to see the Arrow Lake in full capacity once it’s released, and whether or not Intel will reconsider including hyperthreading in its future processors.

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