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

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. 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. 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. We think of AMD and Intel as exactly what they are — fierce rivals. However, the U.S. government is encouraging Intel to consider a merger with a rival, such as AMD, to counteract the intense financial trouble the company has been in over the past several months, according to a report from Semafor. Intel just released its earnings for the third quarter of the year, where the company revealed that it had lost $16.6 billion. Year-over-year, Intel’s net profit margin has dropped by 6,064.76%. That’s not a typo. Intel is bleeding money, and according to the report, the U.S. government sees the chipmaker as too important to go under. At the moment, Semafor reports that talks between the government and Intel are “purely precautionary,” but multiple options to recover the brand are on the table. Intel’s Arrow Lake is just a couple of days from hitting the market, and we’ve been inundated with various reports and leaked benchmarks. Today’s news doesn’t sound good, though. YouTuber Moore’s Law Is Dead reports that Arrow Lake, also referred to as Core Ultra 200-S, may have some instability issues — much like what we’ve seen Intel battle for months on end with Raptor Lake. Before we dive in, keep in mind that all of this is yet to be confirmed, and we’re mere days away from finding out whether it’s true or not. However, it could give some buyers a reason to hold off and read the reviews before preordering the CPUs. Moore’s Law Is Dead talked about various reviewers and tech YouTubers who had something bad to say about Arrow Lake’s stability. The issues are twofold: A wild discrepancy between benchmarks, and running into crashes. An upcoming Intel graphics solution, namely the Intel Arc 140T, has recently been spotted on GFXBench. The most interesting bit is that it offers a noticeable performance advantage over the Xe2-based Arc 140V iGPU that recently made its appearance on Intel’s latest Lunar Lake mobile CPUs. A post by X (formerly Twitter) user Michael (@miktdt) compares GFXbench scores of the Arc 140T with two Arc 140V SKUs—one with 16GB memory and the other with 8GB. The 8GB Arc 140V reached 6,613 frames with an average of 106.7 framers per second (fps), while the 16GB version achieved 6,839 frames at 110.3 fps. However, the Intel Arc 140T, equipped with 16GB of memory, excelled with 11,056 frames at an average of 178.3 fps, surpassing the 16GB Arc 140V by 62%, despite both GPUs sharing eight Xe cores.