Despite no-showing at CES 2026, leaks still predict that Intel will launch the Arrow Lake Refresh mobile CPUs sometime in March or April 2026, and one of the CPUs slated to launch then is the mobile flagship Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus, which has incidentally showed up in a recent PassMark CPU benchmark (via X86isdeadandback on X). According to the PassMark listing, the Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus, which was supposedly tested in an MSI laptop equipped with an RTX 5090 and 32 GB of Samsung DDR5-5600 memory, the upcoming CPU will handily outpace the former flagship mobile CPU by around 7.5% in single-thread performance and a healthy 12.8% in the multicore benchmark. If the Core Ultra 9 285HX is anything to go by, there may still be some performance on the table with faster DDR5-6400 memory.
The Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus scored 66203 in the multicore benchmark and 5009 in the single-core benchmark. This performance puts it less than 2% away from the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K desktop CPU (which scored 67430 and 5093, respectively), which is certainly an impressive feat. Of course, all the usual caveats apply when it comes to early CPU benchmarks—especially leaked benchmarks. For starters, the official launch is still a while away, and clock speeds and microcode may not be entirely dialed-in yet. This is also a sample size of one, and CPU performance can often vary greatly between different configurations. The new CPU first appeared in a previously leaked Geekbench benchmark of an Acer Predator laptop, which also revealed that the Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus will use the same P-core and E-core layout as the older 285HX, meaning eight P-cores and 16 e-cores.
