Intel’s upcoming Bartlett Lake lineup is turning heads after a major milestone: the first PassMark appearance of its P-core-only flagship, the Intel Core 9 273PQE. Even with far fewer total cores than today’s top Raptor Lake Refresh desktop chips, this processor still manages to post surprisingly strong benchmark results—especially in single-threaded performance.
Bartlett Lake launched recently as an embedded-focused CPU family, topping out at 12 Performance cores and a 125W power rating. While many modern Intel desktop processors mix Performance cores (P-cores) and Efficient cores (E-cores), Bartlett Lake takes a different route by going all-in on P-cores. That design choice makes the early performance numbers especially interesting, because it suggests Intel can still deliver high-end results without relying on large core counts boosted by efficiency cores.
In PassMark testing, the Core 9 273PQE delivered a multi-threaded score of 45,427 points. On paper, it looks outmatched by the Intel Core i9-14900K, which packs 24 total cores (8 P-cores plus 16 E-cores) and 32 threads. But the gap is smaller than you might expect: the 273PQE lands about 22% behind the 14900K in multi-threaded performance, despite having only 12 cores and 24 threads.
The comparison gets even more intriguing against the Intel Core i7-14700K. In multi-threaded performance, the Core 9 273PQE is only about 12% slower, yet it’s reported to be around 4% faster in single-threaded performance. That’s a strong result for workloads that benefit from high per-core speed—think gaming, many productivity apps, and latency-sensitive tasks—where single-core and lightly-threaded performance can matter just as much as raw multi-core throughput.
It’s also worth noting what makes this chip different from typical “Core i9” expectations. Despite the Core 9 branding, the 273PQE isn’t positioned as a direct replacement for the Core i9-14900K in the mainstream desktop sense. It’s the top Bartlett Lake part, but its defining trait is the P-core-only design rather than a massive hybrid core count. Still, trading blows with much larger CPUs in single-threaded tests while staying reasonably close in multi-threaded benchmarks makes it stand out as a potentially excellent high-performance processor for intensive computing and gaming-focused scenarios.
The big catch is availability. Right now, Bartlett Lake is aimed at the embedded segment, not the mainstream consumer desktop market. So while these benchmarks show real potential, most PC builders shouldn’t expect a retail desktop launch—at least based on current plans.
Here’s a quick overview of the Intel Bartlett Lake-S family specifications, highlighting core counts, clocks, cache, power targets, and memory support:
If these early PassMark results are any indication, Intel’s P-core-only approach with Bartlett Lake is far from a niche experiment. The Core 9 273PQE shows that strong per-core performance can keep a 12-core processor competitive against much larger hybrid designs—at least in certain benchmarks and usage scenarios. The only question now is whether Intel will ever bring this kind of P-core-only powerhouse beyond embedded systems and into consumer desktops.
