Intel confirms rumored Core Ultra 9 290K Plus has been scrapped — potential Core Ultra 9 285KS Special Edition also off the table as Arrow Lake refresh rolls out

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Intel has been busy preparing and launching the new Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and Ultra 5 250K Plus this week, leaving speculation as to where the Ultra 9 counterpart might be — after all, we saw leaked benchmarks of the flagship part a month ago. Intel confirmed to PCGamesHardware that it has scrapped the Core Ultra 9 290K Plus and won't be releasing the chip. Furthermore, Intel also stated it is scrapping a potential Special Edition Ultra 9 SKU for the Arrow Lake generation as well.

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Intel neglected to share its reasons for cancelling the 290K Plus, but it is easy to guess why. Specs-wise, the chip was rumored to be a very minor boost over the 270K Plus, featuring the same core count and a 200-300MHz clock speed improvement over the 270K Plus, assuming the 290K Plus' rumored clock speeds were true. The lack of any additional cores would have made the 290K Plus a significantly worse product from a value perspective, assuming Intel was going to price the 290K Plus similarly to all of its previous flagships. Even if Intel undercut the 285K's MSRP by $100, the 270K Plus would likely still be a better value at its $300 MSRP.

But to give you an idea of its performance, previous benchmark leaks revealed that the Core Ultra 9 290K Plus was around 10-11% faster than the 285K in Geekbench 6 benchmarks. This shouldn't be interpreted as the actual performance difference between the two chips in real-world applications, but it gives us an idea of the 290K Plus' potential performance. We are also unsure if iBOT was enabled or not on the 290K either.

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No Core Ultra 9 285K/295K Plus Special Edition

Ditching a Special Edition part for Arrow Lake is arguably more surprising than ditching the 290K Plus. Intel has consistently released a Special Edition "KS" flagship every generation for the past several years. Intel first began shipping Special Edition chips with the Core i9-9900KS in 2019, skipped the 10th and 11th generations, then produced the i9-12900KS, i9-13900KS, and i9-14900KS. Intel again did not share its decision to cancel its "KS" product for Arrow Lake, but one reason could be that the 285K couldn't consistently hit 6 GHz; a mark previous KS releases have been able to surpass.

The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and Core Ultra 5 250K Plus debuted this week as quite possibly Intel's last CPUs on the LGA 1851 socket. The new chips focus on improving the criticisms of Intel's previous Arrow-Lake S products, featuring higher clock speeds, four more E-cores, and a much lower MSRP compared to their vanilla Ultra 7 and Ultra 5 counterparts. The cherry on top is hardware integration for Intel's new iBOT tool that can boost IPC by solving inefficiencies in instructions sent to the CPU cores.