Intel admits the Arrow Lake launch missed the mark and promises performance fixes by December, but my testing suggests you shouldn't get your hopes up
In an interview about its Arrow Lake processor launch, Intel admitted that the release didn't go as planned, citing a disparity between its own results and those from reviewers. It also said it has some performance fixes coming soon that should address those differences. But my own meeting with Intel, and additional tests I've carried out since, suggest you shouldn't expect to see any big gains heading your way.
The promise came from Robert Hallock, Intel's Vice President and general manager of Client AI and Technical Marketing while chatting with HotHardware. He began by pointing out where Intel has discovered problems. «I can't go into all the details yet, but we identified a series of [multifactor] issues. They're at the OS level, they're at the BIOS level.»
Hallock also remarked on Arrow Lake's test results, saying that «the performance we saw in review—and to be very clear, through no fault of reviewers—was not what we expected and not what we intended. The launch just didn't go as planned.»
The phrase «not what we expected» is particularly interesting because in my meeting with Intel, after I provided them with my full set of results and benchmarking methods prior to the review's release, it said those figures were in line with its internal testing, albeit a little bit behind in some tests.
But even so, I'm not convinced Arrow Lake can be so easily fixed, for gaming at least. I've been experimenting with changing the multitude of clocks in Core Ultra 200S processors, as well as testing them with different RAM speeds. The most stable, overclocked configuration I could achieve, with some super-fast RAM, was an 11% increase in the compute tile's cache ring clock, a 15% increase in the uncore clock (NGU), and a 19% increase in the die-to-die (D2D) clock.
Paired with a 48 GB kit of DDR5-8000 RAM, running in Gear 2 mode, the average performance boost was just 2% to the mean frame rate and a decrease of 7% in the 1% low figures. Mind you, the culprit for the latter
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