Intel's Arrow Lake-H has been put through its paces by hardware sleuth Golden Pig Upgrade Pack in his latest review at Bilibili. The tested models include the 16-core Core Ultra 9 285H and the 14-core Core Ultra 5 225H, though most of the spotlight is on the flagship variant.
Arrow Lake-H differs slightly from its desktop counterpart because it brings back LPE cores. Since Intel didn't offer much clarification, we aren't sure whether these cores are based on Skymont or Crestmont. In the latter case, Arrow Lake-H likely reuses the SoC Tile from Meteor Lake-H, but let's not jump to conclusions. The P and E cores employ the Lion Cove and Skymont architectures, respectively, cutting off Hyper-Threading.
The Core Ultra 9 285H offers 16 cores (six P-cores + eight E-cores + two LPE-cores) and 16 threads with a turbo clock of 5.4 GHz. The more mainstream-oriented 225H drops to 14 cores (four P-cores + eight E-cores + two LPE-cores), featuring a still-impressive 4.9 GHz turbo frequency. These processors have been compared against the Ryzen AI 9 365 packed with 10 cores (four Zen 5 + six Zen 5c) / 20 threads, and the high-end Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 leading the pack with 12 cores (four Zen 5 + eight Zen 5c) and 24 threads.
The shared images suggest this review was conducted on Lenovo's most recent IdeaPad series outfitted with Arrow Lake. Jumping into the benchmarks, the Core Ultra 9 285H surges ahead of the Cinebench R23 and R24 competition. In the single-core test, the 285H leads its predecessor by 13% with an impressive 26% uplift moving over to multi-core performance. However, all that glitters is not gold, and glancing at the efficiency slide doesn't paint a rosy picture for the 285H.
Limited to just 50W of power, Intel's Arrow Lake-H flagship fails to overtake the Ryzen AI 9 365 and considerably trails the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370. This is quite interesting as desktop Arrow Lake was much faster than Zen 5 in power-limited scenarios. The lackluster efficiency display could be attributed to the testing conditions or the supposedly older SoC Tile, but that's just a guess.
Arrow Lake-H's integrated GPU (iGPU) is based on a modified version of Alchemist with XMX cores. With that in mind, Intel has significantly improved 3DMark's testing suite. The most considerable uplift comes in ray tracing, where Arrow Lake leads Meteor Lake by almost 88%.
The same cannot be said for games where AMD's Radeon 880M is consistently ahead, and by some margin. Here, Alchemist+ yields little to no benefit over standard Alchemist. Funnily enough, Xe2 on Lunar Lake is the polar opposite as it struggles in synthetics but has managed to solidify its position as the fastest gaming iGPU, beating even the Radeon 890M.
After the switch to a disaggregated design, Intel will probably be leveraging the same CPU Tile from the desktop for Arrow Lake-H on mobile. This was an interesting faceoff, but it raises several questions, especially regarding efficiency. Intel didn't specifically discuss Arrow Lake-H's architecture at its keynote, so we can only guess now.
