Introduction

The Intel Core Ultra 7 265K Arrow Lake forms the gateway to the enthusiast processor segment from team blue. With today’s processor launches, the desktop segment enters a truly new generation of Intel processors, which require a new Socket LGA1851 motherboard. The 265K succeeds a long line of desktop processors that had been considered flagship until the Core i9-9900K came along, bringing the Core i9 extension over from HEDTs. The “6” in the 265K shouldn’t be odd, the Core i7-2600K Sandy Bridge used this digit. The Core Ultra 7 265K squares off against the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X given its roughly-$400 pricing, but comparisons can also be made to the 9700X.

The Core Ultra 7 265K retains to core configuration of its immediate predecessor—8P+12E, which means you get all eight Lion Cove performance cores present on the Arrow Lake-S silicon, and 12 out of 16 Skymont E-cores. A lot has been said about Skymont since its debut with the Lunar Lake mobile processor. Intel has given this E-core a nearly 50% generational leap in IPC over Gracemont, which means that even at its moderately high clock-speeds, they should contribute in a big way to multithreaded productivity workloads that scale across all cores. Unlike on Lunar Lake, the E-cores and P-cores sit on a common CPU complex, sharing a ringbus and an L3 cache. The 265K is configured with 30 MB of it (a slight reduction from the 33 MB on the i7-14700K). Each of the 8 P-cores comes with 3 MB of dedicated L2 caches, while the E-cores, organized in clusters of 4 cores each, has 4 MB of it per cluster.

We’ve gone into great depths of the new Arrow Lake architecture in our preview article, thanks to Intel giving the press a two-week heads-up before the reviews. Arrow Lake heralds disaggregated chiplet-based design to the desktop segment. Intel made tile-based mobile processors starting with Core Ultra Series 1 Meteor Lake, and it’s been making tile-based Xeon Scalable server processors for many years now. Put simply, this is Pat Gelsinger’s IDM 2.0 product development strategy in action—you identify those components on your processor that benefit the most from the latest foundry node, and build only those on the new node, while giving the others foundry nodes based on their “needs” (tangible impact on power). The CPU complex of Arrow Lake is built on the latest 3 nm TSMC EUV node, the iGPU on the fairly advanced 5 nm TSMC EUV, while everything else is built on 6 nm TSMC DUV. If you’ve noticed, almost all key components of the chip are built on a TSMC node, except the Foveros base tile, which is just a glorified interposer.

The Compute tile has all CPU cores on the processor, there are no low-power island E-cores. The Graphics tile has a fairly well kitted out iGPU based on the Xe LPG graphics architecture with DirectX 12 Ultimate capability, and 4 Xe cores. The SoC tile has all the platform controllers, and an NPU, although this is the same 13 TOPS NPU from Meteor Lake, and not the 45 TOPS NPU from Lunar Lake, which means while the Core Ultra 7 265K can claim to include an NPU, it doesn’t meet Microsoft Copilot+ local acceleration requirements. There’s still a lot you can do with this NPU, though.

Each of the eight Lion Cove P-cores on the Core Ultra 7 265K comes with a 3.90 GHz base frequency, while the maximum P-core boost is set to 5.50 GHz. From this, Turbo Boost 2.0 takes the P-cores to 5.40 GHz, while Turbo Boost Max 3.0 is used to push a couple of cores further up to 5.50 GHz. The twelve Skymont E-cores come with a 3.30 GHz base frequency, and boost up to 4.60 GHz. Intel has given the 265K the same power values as the flagship 285K, which means its base power is rated at 125 W, and maximum turbo power at 250 W.

Intel is pricing the Core Ultra 7 265K at an attractive $390, or just $80 more than the Core Ultra 5 245K. It’s also a whopping $80 cheaper than its nearest rival from the AMD camp, the Ryzen 9 9900X Zen 5. The 9900X is a classic 12-core/24-thread processor, while the 265K is a hybrid 20-core/20-thread silicon, 12 of these are E-cores. The Lion Cove P-cores ditch SMT, so the overall thread count has reduced compared to the i7-14700K (28 threads). The new Socket LGA1851 retains cooler compatibility with LGA1700. The added pin-count comes with the addition of four more PCIe Gen 5 lanes from the processor, so you can now have a Gen 5 NVMe SSD that doesn’t eat into your x16 PEG interface.