Intel is getting rid of one of the features that has defined most of the best processors for more than a decade — Hyper-Threading. It’s the branded name Intel uses for simultaneous multi-threading, or SMT, and the company has already confirmed it won’t use SMT on its upcoming Lunar Lake mobile CPUs. Rumor has it the company is also ditching SMT for its Arrow Lake desktop CPUs. Surprisingly, according to new leaks, killing SMT might have been the right call after all.
A handful of benchmarks have leaked for Arrow Lake CPUs. Starting off, the Core Ultra 7 265K and Core Ultra 9 285K both popped up in the Geekbench 6 database. The flagship Core Ultra 9 is a 24-core part, and it achieved a score of 21,075 in Geekbench 6’s multi-core test. That’s slightly above what you’ll see with the Ryzen 9 9950X and on-par with the Core i9-14900K, both of which come with 32 threads due to SMT.
The Core Ultra 7 265K results are much more interesting. This 20-core chip achieved a score of 19,799, outpacing the last-gen Ryzen 9 7950X and the current-gen Ryzen 9 9900X. Rounding out the stack, ECSM_Official shared results for the Core Ultra 5 245K on X (formerly Twitter), pushing ahead of the Core i5-14600K by around 10%. That’s despite the fact that it has access to far fewer threads.
As is the case with any leaked benchmarks, we’re only seeing a fraction of the full story here. We expect to see Arrow Lake CPUs in October, which Intel has confirmed will be manufactured by an external foundry — a first for its desktop CPU business. We’ll need to see how the chips stack up once they’re here officially before drawing any firm conclusions. These are likely engineering samples, which may have slightly different specs than the official releases.
Still, there are promising signs for killing SMT. The idea behind getting rid of the feature on Lunar Lake is to improve power efficiency, which is very important for a laptop in this new era of devices. Battery life isn’t a concern on desktop, but power efficiency still matters, especially as Intel continues to climb out of power-related instability issues on its 13th-gen and 14th-gen CPUs.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.
Two new highly requested iCloud plugins just got added to ChatGPT, giving people who rely on Apple’s Mail and Calendar services a way to search emails, check appointments, and manage their schedules directly through the chatbot.
The integration is rolling out to all ChatGPT plans, including the free tier. You can access it on the web, desktop, and iOS.