In what’s likely to annoy the desktop team in Santa Clara, the Core Ultra 5 235HX has shown up in PassMark and delivered a proper clobbering to its last-gen rivals. Despite being a budget SKU with no hyper-threading and a relatively modest 14 cores, it still posted a 38 per cent uplift in multi-threaded performance over the Core i5 14500HX, which does have hyper-threading.

The chip clocks up to 5.1GHz on the P-Cores and 4.5GHz on the E-Cores, with a 55W TDP and a 160W turbo, just a smidge higher than its predecessor. Yet somehow, this chip manages to outpace higher-tier processors, including those with more cores and threads.

The Core Ultra 5 235HX scored 4,708 in single-thread and 40,122 in multi-thread tests. That’s not just an upgrade over its predecessor, it also makes a mockery of Core i7 14700HX, beating it by 18 per cent in single-thread and 7 per cent in multi-thread.

Even more embarrassing for Troubled Chipzilla’s internal hierarchy is that the 235HX beats the Core i9 14900HX in single-thread performance by 11 per cent, and only trails it by the same amount in multi-core workloads, despite having fewer cores.

To add insult to injury for AMD, the chip  squeaks past Ryzen 7 9800X3D and Ryzen 9 9955HX3D in single-threaded tests. The gap’s only six per cent, but it still counts.

The Ultra 5 235HX is now within sniffing distance of the Core Ultra 9 275HX, at least in raw single-core grunt. Of course, none of this tells us much about real-world gaming performance, where AMD’s 9000 series X3D parts are still the top dogs.

Still, for raw productivity on a mobile platform, the Core Ultra 5 235HX looks like a serious bit of kit. If this is what Intel’s lower-tier mobile chips are pulling off, it might be time for desktop Arrow Lake to sit quietly and reflect on its life choices.