Today’s Linux benchmarking at Phoronix is looking at how the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K performance has evolved since its launch last October. Taking the launch-day benchmarks from October with the same hardware, we are revisiting the Intel Arrow Lake performance under Linux today using the newest system BIOS and the newly-released Ubuntu 25.04 for seeing how the performance has evolved roughly over the past half-year.
I’ll say right off the bat that the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K performance has improved a lot under Linux since launch. More than I anticipated going into these days. Since last October I have reported on various Linux kernel optimizations specific to helping out the newest Intel processors from P-State driver optimizations to other P/E core hybrid adjustments and more. Plus there have been various general Linux kernel optimizations too over this time. And then there’s also been new BIOS releases designed to help with the performance of Arrow Lake desktop processors. I’ve shown off some of these improvements individually in prior Phoronix articles while today’s redux comparison is the original launch-day data up against the newest Linux software stack and system BIOS.
The hardware was the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K 24-core processor, the ASUS ROG MAXIMUS Z890 HERO motherboard, 2 x 32GB DDR5-6400 Corsair CMK64GX5M2B6400C32 memory (XMP I memory profile as the only system BIOS adjustment made for launch day and repeated on the new system BIOS defaults), 2TB Corsair MP700 PRO NVMe SSD, and Radeon RX 7900 GRE graphics. For the ASUS system BIOS it was jumping from v0503 to v1603 as the newest release as of repeating these tests. As stated, XMP memory profile was the only BIOS change made each time — just making that clear since completely separat has been some news this week around the “200S Boost” overclocking profile feature beginning to roll-out on new BIOSes… This feature was not used/tested as part of this article or any changes along those lines, just coincidental timing with Intel happen to be announcing the feature on the same day as this article being in the publishing queue.
Back for launch-day testing was on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS while upgrading to the Linux 6.10 Git kernel of the time. Now as of last week Ubuntu 25.04 is now available with the Linux 6.14 kernel, GCC 14.2 compiler, and other software upgrades compared to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.
This is quite a straight-forward round of tests with using the same hardware and simply wanting to see where software changes since October have influenced the Core Ultra 9 285K desktop performance on Linux. The CPU power consumption was also monitored then and now for seeing what sort of difference may be there for power efficiency too.
Let’s see how Core Ultra 9 Arrow Lake is looking for Q2’2025.
