Intel may have been right about killing Hyper-Threading after all

By Jacob Roach September 18, 2024

A Core i9-12900KS processor sits on its box. — Jacob Roach / Digital Trends

Intel is getting rid of one of the features that has defined most of the best processors for more than a decade — Hyper-Threading. It’s the branded name Intel uses for simultaneous multi-threading, or SMT, and the company has already confirmed it won’t use SMT on its upcoming Lunar Lake mobile CPUs. Rumor has it the company is also ditching SMT for its Arrow Lake desktop CPUs. Surprisingly, according to new leaks, killing SMT might have been the right call after all.

A handful of benchmarks have leaked for Arrow Lake CPUs. Starting off, the Core Ultra 7 265K and Core Ultra 9 285K both popped up in the Geekbench 6 database. The flagship Core Ultra 9 is a 24-core part, and it achieved a score of 21,075 in Geekbench 6’s multi-core test. That’s slightly above what you’ll see with the Ryzen 9 9950X and on-par with the Core i9-14900K, both of which come with 32 threads due to SMT.

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The Core Ultra 7 265K results are much more interesting. This 20-core chip achieved a score of 19,799, outpacing the last-gen Ryzen 9 7950X and the current-gen Ryzen 9 9900X. Rounding out the stack, ECSM_Official shared results for the Core Ultra 5 245K on X (formerly Twitter), pushing ahead of the Core i5-14600K by around 10%. That’s despite the fact that it has access to far fewer threads.

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As is the case with any leaked benchmarks, we’re only seeing a fraction of the full story here. We expect to see Arrow Lake CPUs in October, which Intel has confirmed will be manufactured by an external foundry — a first for its desktop CPU business. We’ll need to see how the chips stack up once they’re here officially before drawing any firm conclusions. These are likely engineering samples, which may have slightly different specs than the official releases.

Still, there are promising signs for killing SMT. The idea behind getting rid of the feature on Lunar Lake is to improve power efficiency, which is very important for a laptop in this new era of devices. Battery life isn’t a concern on desktop, but power efficiency still matters, especially as Intel continues to climb out of power-related instability issues on its 13th-gen and 14th-gen CPUs.

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Lead Reporter, PC Hardware

Jacob Roach is the lead reporter for PC hardware at Digital Trends. In addition to covering the latest PC components, from…

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