Top Intel Core Ultra 9 “Arrow Lake-S” Part Boost Clocks Surface

Intel Core Ultra “Arrow Lake-S” desktop processors are expected to debut later this year, and introduce the new Lion Cove P-cores, along with Skymont E-cores to the desktop platform. Engineering samples and qualification samples with specs close to retail chips seem to already be in the hands of PC OEMs and motherboard vendors, given the volume of leaks over the past few days. Jaykihn0, one of the more influential sources of these leaks, revealed a few interesting details of the maximum boost frequencies of these chips.

The QS of a top Core Ultra 9 “Arrow Lake-S” SKU, probably the flagship model that succeeds the current Core i9-14900K, is described as having a maximum P-core boost frequency of 5.70 GHz, and an all-P-core boost frequency of 5.40 GHz. The maximum E-core boost frequency, which is also the all-E-core boost frequency, is said to be 4.60 GHz. Let’s unpack this. “Arrow Lake” uses the same mix of “Lion Cove” P-cores and “Skymont” E-cores as “Lunar Lake,” albeit arranged along a ringbus, and sharing an L3 cache, unlike on “Lunar Lake,” where the P-cores have their own exclusive L3 cache, and the E-cores are arranged in a low-power island, with the fabric of the SoC tile connecting the two.

We know from the “Lunar Lake” deep-dive from Intel, that the company claims a 14% IPC gain for “Lion Cove” over the previous generation “Redwood Cove” P-core found in “Meteor Lake.” Given that “Redwood Cove” cores have been tested in the real world to offer roughly similar IPC to the “Raptor Cove” P-cores powering “Raptor Lake,” if Intel’s IPC claims for “Lion Cove” hold, then at 5.70 GHz, the P-cores of “Arrow Lake-S” 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 of these, and as our recent “Zen 5 without SMT” article has shown, games largely aren’t affected with the lack of SMT/HTT if the core count is as high as 8.

The cache sub-system of “Arrow Lake-S” is another interesting factor that could influence its gaming performance. Each “Lion Cove” P-core on the Core Ultra 9 “Arrow Lake-S” is expected to have 3 MB of dedicated L2 cache, and the 8 P-cores share 36 MB of L3 cache along with the four “Skymont” E-core clusters. Thread Director tends to avoid scheduling game workloads on the E-cores, unless there are specific optimizations within the game that use them (eg: for processing game physics, audio DSPs, network stack, etc).

Intel has promised a massive IPC leap for the “Skymont” E-cores over the current “Gracemont,” with the company claiming an IPC resembling that of the “Raptor Lake” P-core. Of course there are some riders—”Skymont” cores don’t boost nearly as high as “Raptor Cove” P-cores do, even in this top Core Ultra 9 SKU, the maximum E-core boost frequency is a moderate 4.60 GHz. Also, the SPECrate2017 benchmark Intel uses in its IPC calculations isn’t memory intensive; “Skymont” cores are clustered into groups of four cores, and made to share a 4 MB L2 cache on “Arrow Lake-S.”

All in all, with these frequencies, the top Core Ultra 9 “Arrow Lake-S” part seems to be gunning for the gaming performance leadership crown from AMD, which has held the bragging rights of selling the fastest gaming processor for 16 months now (since the April 2023 launch of the Ryzen 7 7800X3D).