Intel Core i9-14900KF leak is good and bad news for those hoping for a speedy flagship CPU

Intel’s inbound Core i9-14900KF flagship has been spotted in a leaked benchmark which shows some impressive single-core performance, though the multi-threaded result isn’t quite such an eye-opener.

As VideoCardz noticed, we’ve had some PassMark results pop up for the 14900KF (so not technically the 14900K, but pretty much identical – the only difference here is that there’s no integrated graphics with the ‘KF’ model, but that won’t affect these results at all, it’s irrelevant here).

The Core i9-14900KF recorded a single-thread result of 4,939 in PassMark – add seasoning with any leaked benchmark, of course – which compares to the 13900K hitting 4,666.

That’s almost 6% faster for the 14900KF, reflecting the faster max boost speed which hits 6GHz out of the box (compared to 5.8GHz for the current Raptor Lake flagship).

For multi-threaded performance, PassMark shows the 14900KF pretty much in a dead heat with the 13900K – actually just a touch slower (by about half a percent, so nothing meaningful).

Analysis: Let’s not get carried away (though admittedly, there are concerns here)

That’s a slightly odd spin on these results, as while the single-core jump is pretty much as we’d expect – a decent step on – not making any multi-threaded improvement at all seems strange.

Now, this is just one benchmark, and a leak at that, so we’d do well not to put too much stock in the results anyway. Furthermore, other recent leaks around the Core i9-14900KF have indicated some decent(ish) multi-threaded gains (in Geekbench), so we really need to reserve judgment here. Certainly, we’d expect some increase, not nothing at all for multi-core.

That said, we’re not expecting huge things from Raptor Lake Refresh in general, given the rumblings from the rumor mill about how these 14th-gen desktop processors will be a modest move forward in general.

Another clue in that respect is Intel’s lack of any mention of Raptor Lake Refresh at its recent Innovation event, which again seems a bit off. Team Blue focused entirely on blowing the trumpet for Meteor Lake laptop chips (and their AI capabilities), not even mentioning the desktop side of the next-gen CPU equation. And that doesn’t exactly fill us with confidence…

That’s quite telling in our book, considering that Raptor Lake Refresh is supposed to be about to debut next month (around mid-October). Still, based on part of this leak, we can hold out hope for a decent flagship CPU refresh, and there’s always the 14700K which is expected to up the core count considerably (for efficiency cores, adding four of them), and it should shape up impressively as a result.

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