Explained why Intel decided not to release the Core Ultra 9 290K Plus: its features lack real usefulness

Why Intel Dropped the Core Ultra 9 290K Plus

It turned out that the model existed, leaks and official statements confirmed its existence, but the processor never appeared for sale.

Reason for cancellation
A Chinese reviewer received an engineering sample and ran tests – the performance gain over the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus was extremely small: about 2 % in games and about 4 % in productivity applications.

Technical details
* Architecture – a 24‑core chip (8 high‑performance + 16 power‑efficient), almost the same clock speeds as the Core Ultra 285K, plus DDR5‑7200 support.
* Authenticity verification – Intel’s binary optimization tool that currently works only with Arrow Lake processors.

Synthetic tests
Test: 290K Plus vs 270K Plus
Average advantage
CPU‑Z (multi‑core) +2.84 %
Cinebench R24 (single‑core) +0.69 %
Overall +1.5 %

Real workloads
* The Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 beat it in most tasks, except Ansys Fluent where the 290K Plus was 9.3 % faster than the AMD chip and 4.6 % faster than the 270K Plus.
* Average comparison:

* 290K Plus > 270K Plus – +6.3 %.
* 290K Plus < 9950X3D2 – –8.3 %.

Games
Resolution Average FPS gain (overall)
1080p ~+2 % across six games. The biggest gain was in *Delta Force* (+8.3 %). In *Black Myth: Wukong* and *Resident Evil 9* it lagged behind the 270K Plus by about 1 %.
1440p The gap shrank to ~+1.5 % – almost negligible.

Conclusion
The performance of the Core Ultra 9 290K Plus is so modest that justifying an extra price for a flagship-level Core Ultra 9 chip becomes problematic. Existing Arrow Lake serial models already offer good price‑performance; adding a “mini‑flagship” with minimal advantage could upset the balance of the entire lineup. Therefore Intel decided not to release the 290K Plus in the commercial segment.