Intel is investigating the possibility of its latest Core Ultra 200S CPUs performing better than what independent reviews showed in gaming.
We all saw Intel's Arrow Lake, aka Core Ultra 200S CPU's performance results in gaming and productivity. Unlike what we previously expected, the processors brought a regression in gaming performance. Even though it wasn't the case with CPU-oriented workloads, according to Intel, the gaming performance of these processors should have been better as well.
As per the latest interview of Hot Hardware with Robert Hallock, VP and General Manager at Intel, the initial benchmarks of Core Ultra 200S didn't go as planned. Hallock said that the performance regression was due to multifactor issues at both BIOS and OS levels. While he didn't want to go deeper into the details, it seemed like he was indicating that there are optimization issues with Core Ultra 200S CPUs.
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.
What exactly are the issues at the BIOS and OS levels? We don't know yet, but Intel is currently investigating it to fix them. As per the reports, Intel should come up with the fixes at the end of this month or in early December and these will be particularly directed to gaming performance as the third-party reviews are quite different from what Intel showed.
We also heard similar statements from board vendors who stated that Intel might be working on a new microcode patch to address some of the shortcomings with the Arrow Lake's "Core Ultra 200S" CPU lineup. The patch was expected to launch soon after the launch, but it looks like the company is now taking its time to release this patch.
Robert did talk about memory latency and said that even though some reviewers witness quite high memory latency in some cases(180+ns), it's not the root cause of lackluster gaming performance. He promised that Intel would come back with a detailed analysis and explanation of what has been affecting the gaming performance of these chips.
Nonetheless, even if Intel manages to fix the problems to achieve somewhat better gaming performance, which will be comparable to Intel's slides, one should remember that the performance numbers didn't look impressive at all. However, getting to the performance level of Core i9 14900K is the minimum Intel should aim for, considering it wants to sell the Core Ultra 9 285K and other Arrow Lake CPUs for productivity and 'gaming'.
The 285K does manage to outperform the 14900K in productivity quite easily, but Intel advertised that it will deliver "Elite" gaming performance, which cannot be further from the truth.
At $629, even at the 14900K level of gaming performance, the Core Ultra 9 285K does not stand a chance against the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, which has dismantled the competition completely. However, any uplift will be a good uplift, and we are waiting eagerly for Intel to fix these problems.