Intel will soon launch the company’s new Core Ultra 200 (codenamed Arrow Lake) army, competing against the best CPUs. Images of a qualification sample Arrow Lake CPU have been leaked on the Chinese forum Baidu Tieba (via X user Harukaze5719).
The chip is labeled as the ‘Q33K,’ not a final product name but an internal codename akin to pre-launch AMD CPUs referred to by their OPN code or other numbers. While the full codename is hard to make out, the ‘Q’ could signify that this is a qualification sample, a kind of CPU that closely resembles the final product but is still not quite ready for launch. It could also be an engineering sample, much farther from the final product than a qualification sample.
Beyond the pictures of the chip’s front and back, there are very few details on what the sample was used for. The Baidu poster explicitly asks not to “ask where it came from,” that they “don’t have NDA,” and to “please delete if it infringes your rights,” according to Google Translate.
Another Baidu user suggests the image came from Xianyu, a used goods marketplace hosted by the e-commerce company Taobao. The user did not provide the link to this Xianyu listing (assuming it exists and that the user wasn’t merely guessing). Still, it wouldn’t be that strange since half a dozen Arrow Lake mechanical samples were spotted on the site earlier this week. Those chips are being sold for about $1,360.54 and are marked as ‘QDF4’ chips.
The motherboard and cooler manufacturers purportedly used the QDF4 samples to grasp the physical size of Arrow Lake CPUs, so they may not even have any silicon underneath the heatspreader. It might be the same situation for the Q33K sample, but given the lack of details, it’s hard to say one way or another. According to hardware insider Jaykihn, though, this Q33K is some sort of pre-launch version of the Core Ultra 7 265K in particular.
The 265K is expected to launch with eight P-cores and 12 E-cores. It would be the second-fastest SKU in the Arrow Lake lineup and a direct successor to the Core i7-14700K. According to a July Geekbench 5 result, a pre-launch 265K chip seemingly beat the 14700K by 7% in the single-thread part of the test but lagged behind its predecessor in the multi-threaded portion, where the 14700K was 16% faster.
Arrow Lake will allegedly launch on October 24 to rival AMD’s Zen 5-powered Ryzen 9000 processors. It won't be long before we see how the retail Core Ultra 7 265K performs.
