Intel admits ‘self-inflicted wounds’ with Core Ultra 200S CPUs not performing as well as expected – but promises fixes are coming

November 11

Intel acknowledges Arrow Lake CPUs underperformed at launch
A full and detailed audit is going to take place as to why this happened
Fixes for the issues are coming, promising significant performance gains

Intel’s Core Ultra 200S processors have got off to a shaky start, it’s fair to say, and Team Blue has acknowledged this – and pledged that fixes are coming.

The new Arrow Lake desktop CPUs – comprising of the Core Ultra 9 285K, Core Ultra 7 265K and Core Ultra 5 245K – have been greeted with a lukewarm reception, particularly for gaming performance, and reviews have been rather varied in the benchmark results they’ve uncovered in this respect.

Robert Hallock, who is VP of marketing at Intel, spoke to Hot Hardware, and said the company takes full responsibility for the initial launch performance of Core Ultra 200 chips being under par compared to Intel’s own expectations (and prerelease hype).

Hallock told the tech site that “our wounds with Arrow Lake not hitting the performance we projected were self-inflicted.”

The Intel marketing guru added: “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.”

Hallock underlined that while he couldn’t give specifics, Intel plans to conduct a full audit and will present an itemized list of Arrow Lake problems, explaining every single glitch, along with its performance cost, and what the company is going to do to fix these issues.

Intel’s Hallock On Arrow Lake Core Ultra 200S Processor Performance Fixes – YouTube
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Intel is being refreshingly honest, or Hallock is, rather, which is good to see – and something of a growing theme of late for Team Blue, we’ve noticed. With all the problems Intel has been running into in recent times – throughout this year – this appears to be the decided tactic to try to rebuild trust with the computing public.

Will it be enough? The trouble is that the perception is increasingly becoming one of Intel stumbling from one blunder to another, at least with its desktop CPUs (laptop chips are a different kettle of silicon, and Lunar Lake has landed as a major success, in the main).

We’ve had all the messiness around 13th and 14th-gen desktop CPUs being wonky and unstable (and while that’s finally been put to bed, some folks may still be worried), and now with the 15th-gen on the desktop, there’s a new set of problems at launch. And anecdotally, across various forums, we’ve noticed a fair few complaints from folks who’ve upgraded to the Arrow Lake platform (the CPU has a new socket, requiring a new motherboard) hitting various teething issues which sound unpleasant to say the least.

All in all, with continued issues seeming to crop up around Intel’s desktop processors, creating a general air of uncertainty, these products will hardly be inspiring confidence in the PC community. Intel needs to come back with a strong response here, and a full, transparent audit on Arrow Lake will be a good start – hopefully with the issues fixed down the line, as promised.

We should temper expectations, of course, and it’s not likely that this will be some kind of miracle cure for the performance of the Core Ultra 200S range. However, it promises to deliver a ‘significant’ boost on the gaming front. Also, Hot Hardware’s tweaking of a Core Ultra 9 285K flagship – comprising of memory tuning, Windows configuration adjustments, and disabling some CPU features – reportedly did witness impressive results, at least for some PC games. As ever, gains may vary based on the individual game, and, of course, the configuration of your PC.

However, fundamentally, Arrow Lake still remains more about pushing forward with efficiency than generational performance leaps when it comes to gaming, and that obviously isn’t going to change with some patching work. Here, the predecessor flagship, the Core i9-14900K (or indeed the 13900K) is still likely to remain a better bet, particularly considering pricing (with previous-gen price tags dropping), as was shown in the gaming tests during our review of the new Core Ultra 9 285K.

Furthermore, all this is compounded by the release of AMD’s peppy new Ryzen 9800X3D on the PC gaming front (when stock issues settle down for that CPU, which is a sizeable caveat currently).