While Panther Lake was the focus of Intel's CES 2026 presence, the company will also refresh its current-gen Arrow Lake lineup for both desktops and laptops soon. We've already seen these "Plus" processors in a few leaks, including a Geekbench listing, but a mobile SKU has been spotted in PassMark for the first time ever: the Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus, succeeding the outgoing Core Ultra 9 285HX.
The Arrow Lake refresh scored 5,009 points in the single-core test, the highest for any x86 CPU on the site, and within the margin of error of the desktop Core Ultra 9 285K and Core Ultra 7 270K Plus. It seems to be the first x86 mobile chip to break the 5,000 points barrier as well, since the next-in-line 285HX only managed 4,635 points, making the 290HX Plus 7.5% faster than its predecessor.
(Image credit: Future)
Moving on to the multi-core score, the Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus netted 66,203 points, just a smidge below the full-fat Core Ultra 9 285K, along with AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X3D. That score already places it at number three in the desktop consumer x86 CPU hierarchy, but it's at the very top when it comes to mobile-only numbers. It beats even AMD's Ryzen 9 9955HX3D by 6.2% while Intel's own Core Ultra 9 285HX is 12.8% behind.
(Image credit: Future)
These results are from a single test, meaning the sample size is just one, so take all these performance estimates with a grain of salt. The PassMark listing also shows that the Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus boosted to 5.45 GHz, and leaker x86deadandback speculated that the laptop used for testing was running DDR5-5600 SO-DIMM memory from Samsung.
As for the chip's specs, we know it's a routine refresh that maintains much of the same silicon. You're looking at a 24-core/24-thread config, with 8 performance cores and 16 efficiency cores. The clock speeds are unknown, but it could be around 5.4-5.5 GHz for the 290HX Plus based on this PassMark run. Current rumors indicate that the Arrow Lake refresh will launch in March or April of this year.
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