If you're a regular reader of our hardware news and reviews, you'll know that Intel's much-vaunted Core Ultra 200S series of processors not only failed to impress at launch but it's seemingly been left to flag against the competition. In a new blog post today, which we've had early access to, Intel says that while the former is undoubtedly true, it has been busy identifying what went wrong, with four key issues noted and fixes published.
Arrow Lake's gaming performance was known to be lower than last-gen Raptor Lake's before the testing even commenced because Intel openly said that this would be the case when it launched its new CPU architecture in October. The primary goal for multi-tiled processors was lower power consumption in games, while still offering generational performance gains in multithreaded workloads.
The latter was certainly achieved but once we all got our hands on the Core Ultra 9 285K and Core Ultra 5 245K (replacements for the Core i9 14900K and Core i5 14600K), it was clear that Intel was experiencing very different gaming performance to reviewers. After a while, though, and after I had spoken with Intel about my results, the truth of the matter came to light: Arrow Lake wasn't as good as expected and something was obviously amiss.
In the update, Intel notes that its engineers have identified four specific issues that were causing significant problems with gaming performance.
Modern CPUs can operate in all kinds of performance states but they require active support by the operating system in order to function properly. This is done via a PPM package—think of it as a driver that controls clock speeds and other timings, depending on what power settings the OS is using.
Intel didn't schedule the PPM for Arrow Lake to appear in a Windows Update, in time for reviews and retail availability of the Core Ultra 200S chips. The results? In Intel's words, «Unusual CPU scheduling behaviour; artificial performance increases when cores are disabled or
UPS
Arrow
Updates
performer
Show
testing
Profiles