For those not in the know, Intel has confirmed that it is giving up on hyperthreading on its upcoming Lunar Lake mobile CPUs and there are rumours that it will not be seen on Arrow Lake desktop CPUs either.

A few benchmarks have leaked for Arrow Lake CPUs which seem to show the wisdom in Chipzilla’s move. The Core Ultra 7 265K and Core Ultra 9 285K appeared in the  Geekbench 6 database. The flagship Core Ultra 9 is a 24-core part, and it scored 21,075 in Geekbench 6’s multi-core test.

That’s slightly above what you’ll see with the Ryzen 9 9950X and equal to the Core i9-14900K, both of which come with 32 threads due to hyperthreading.

The 20-core Core Ultra 7 265K scored 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 per cent. It did this with far fewer threads.

All this indicates that getting rid of hyperthreading might have been a good idea. While its absence does not make a lot of difference to these later chips, it does help improve power efficiency on mobile devices.

Chipzilla needs to improve its battery life on mobiles and sort out the power-related instability issues on its 13th-gen and 14th-gen CPUs and getting rid of hyperthreading will help.