Leaked benchmarks indicate that Intel's 2024-bound Core Ultra 9 185H doesn't have much to offer in the way of raw performance gain and chooses to focus on power efficiency instead. Those looking for raw processing power on a laptop will have to look at the Raptor Lake-HX refresh with SKUs such as the Core i9-14900HX. However, the generation-over-generation gains are tepid on that front, too, if a recent Geekbench listing is accurate.
The Intel Core i9-14900HX scores 2,998 and 17,937 in Geekbench's single and multi-core tests, resulting in a ~10% and ~8% increase in performance compared to the Core i9-13900HX (2,720/16,522). It performs on par with an Intel Core i9-13980HX (2,881/17,564 in Geekbench 6.2), which is impressive for a mid-cycle refresh. The laptop in question is from Acer, and it packs 32 GB of DDR5 5600 RAM.
Geekbench also reveals that the mystery Core i9-14900HX laptop comes with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 graphics card, which scores 169,508 in the OpenCL benchmark. This is likely the refreshed version of the Acer Predator Helios 18 that debuted at CES earlier this year. If last year's release cycle is anything to go by, it will likely follow suit and launch at CES 2024.