Intel Core Ultra 9 288V: Flagship Lunar Lake CPU trades blows with Strix Point in Geekbench

Until now, a couple of Geekbench listings have shown off how Intel's Lunar Lake CPUs perform compared to their last-gen counterparts, including the Core Ultra 7 268V, Core Ultra 7 256V and Core Ultra 5 236V. Now, we finally get to see the flagship Core Ultra 9 288V in action and it is quite impressive.

It scores 2,901 and 9,596 in Geekbench 6.3's single and multi-core tests. Geekbench shows the CPU running at an absurd boost clock, but its back end reveals the real figure: ~5.0 GHz, which is close to its leaked boost clock of 5.1 GHz. The 8-core (4 P + 4 E) Core Ultra 9 288V is running alongside an unreleased MSI Prestige laptop with 32 GB of on-package LPDDR5X RAM.

Performance-wise, the Core Ultra 9 288V offers a 6% single-core uplift over the Core Ultra 7 268V due to its slightly higher boost clock and 30 Watt PL1 and PL2 values. It even trades blows AMD's Strix Point-based Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 (2,879/14,888) in single-core performance.

So far, Lunar Lake has the potential to overtake AMD in single-core CPU performance, but Team Red is slated to reign supreme in the multi-core and iGPU department. Besides, the real contest won't begin until next year when Arrow Lake-HX/H laptops start hitting shelves alongside AMD's Strix Halo SKUs.