Exclusive: Intel Exec Promises Arrow Lake Fixes For Major Performance Gains

Speaking plainly, Intel's recently-launched Core Ultra 200 desktop CPUs, code-named "Arrow Lake", weren't quite what we expected out of this new generation of chips from Intel. While productivity and content creation performance was potent in some cases, gaming performance saw a significant regression. As it happens, Intel was as disappointed by some of these results just as the community was, and is apparently hot on the trail of root cause identification with a host of fixes are inbound as well.

Speaking to us on our recent livestream, Intel's Robert Hallock was candid in saying that the Arrow Lake launch was indeed disastrous, but that it was in large part due to launch day performance being below Intel's own expectations and the result of test systems not being properly optimized. Hallock was quick to take the blame for the launch day missteps on Intel's behalf, saying that "our wounds with Arrow Lake not hitting the performance we projected were self-inflicted."  

Hit The Play Button For Much More Detail From Our Livestream With Intel

By that, Robert means that Intel isn't blaming Microsoft or any of its other partners—the fault for the feeble launch of the Core Ultra 200 desktop CPUs lies squarely at Intel's feet. Hallock noted that miscommunications, both inside Intel and with its partners, introduced issues that sapped significant performance from the Core Ultra 200 series desktop CPUs. Fortunately, however, things could be improving for Arrow Lake soon.

Hallock assured us that firmware and software updates were on the way to claw back a significant lift to its Core Ultra 200S Series desktop processors. How much of a performance boost? Hallock didn't say, and he also didn't elaborate on what those updates would be exactly, just that they were coming in a matter of weeks.

Here's exactly what was offered by Robert -

"I can't go into all the details yet, but we identified a series of multifactor issues at the OS level, at the BIOS level, and I will say that the performance we saw in reviews is not what we expected and not what we intended. The launch just didn't go as planned. That has been a humbling lesson for all of us, inspiring a fairly large response internally to get to the bottom of what happened and to fix it."

Regardless, we can speculate, of course; we actually received two Core Ultra 9 processors and your author here spent some time tweaking and tuning the one that we didn't use for our review to see if we could eke some better performance out of it.

Indeed, through a mix of memory tuning, Windows tweaking, and critically, disabling processor features, we did manage to see radical performance upgrades in some games, like Warframe, Monster Hunter, and RPCS3 emulator. So saying, we expect that the promised updates for Arrow Lake will likely address the issues that we observed in our testing.

Mr. Hallock noted fixes will be a combination of firmware updates and software patches, rolled out both through Windows Update as well as the usual cadre of motherboard vendor BIOS updates and system partners. He promised a "significant" uplift in games, but also potentially in general compute, which might give Intel even more wins over the potent Ryzen 9 9950X at the high end. We'll see, hopefully at by end of the month or shortly after, according to Robert, so stay tuned.