Meet the Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus, a new 24-core Arrow Lake refresh gaming CPU, according to this benchmark leak

It looks as though the wait for Intel's next lineup of gaming CPUs is nearly over, as we've just spotted a benchmark leak that not only reveals a new CPU brand name, but also some of the key specs. According to the leak, the new Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus offers a substantial boost in core count compared to its predecessor, the Core Ultra 7 265K, adding an extra four E-Cores to the package.

Those extra E-Cores won't make much difference to gaming performance, but they will give the chip an extra helping hand in multi-threaded workloads such as video encoding and 3D rendering. As we found in our Core Ultra 7 265K review, the strong points of the Intel Arrow Lake architecture are multi-threaded performance, as well as cool operation and power efficiency. Our recent 265K retest also showed that Intel has made up some lost ground in game benchmarks now too, although AMD's X3D chips are still well ahead.

Here are the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus specifications, according to a benchmark listing on Geekbench, as Intel hasn't officially announced this CPU.

While we're not expecting the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus to storm onto our guide to buying the best gaming CPU, if and when it's finally released, it looks as though Intel is planning to play to Arrow Lake's strengths by bolstering the new chip with more cores. The company played a similar game when it launched the Core i7 14700K, which was based on the same Raptor Lake core architecture as the previous Core i7 13700K, but added four more E-Cores to take the total up to 20.

The key difference this time is that, with eight P-Cores and 16 E-Cores, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus in this benchmark leak has the same number of cores as the expensive Core Ultra 9 285K, whereas the Core i9 14900K still had four more E-Cores than the 14700K. We're not expecting the refreshed Core Ultra 9 CPU, which now looks as though it may well be called the Core Ultra 9 290K Plus, to have more cores than its predecessor, but it may have a higher clock speed to help differentiate it.

There are some clock speeds listed in the specs for the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus in the benchmark leak as well, which you can see for yourself on the Geekbench results browser. The CPU is listed as having a 3.7GHz base clock, which is 200MHz below the 265K's base clock, while the maximum boost clock is listed as 5,487MHz.

According to the results listing, the benchmark leak comes from a Lenovo machine listed as being "invalid", and it's likely to be using an engineering sample of the CPU. As such, these clock speeds may not be representative of the final silicon. A boost clock of 5.5GHz could be legitimate, though, if Intel is choosing to differentiate this chip with its core counts rather than clock speed. Meanwhile, the benchmark itself is an OpenCL test that stresses the GPU (an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090D), rather than the CPU, so there's no meaningful indication of the CPU's performance here.

The good news is that it looks as though the CPU won't require a new motherboard if you already own an Intel Arrow Lake system, as the socket is listed as being LGA1851. As such, you should just be able to flash the BIOS on your existing board and drop the new CPU into it. You can check out our guide to buying the best gaming motherboard if you're thinking about building a new system.

Is this enough for Intel to compete against AMD, or should we just wait for Nova Lake now? Let us know your thoughts in our community Discord server.