There’s good news on the horizon for the Core Ultra 200 series Arrow Lake processors as Intel identifies performance-hindering issues. HotHardware had the opportunity to speak with Robert Hallock, someone who wears a lot of hats, as Intel’s VP and GM while also working in its Client AI & Technical Marketing divisions. The discussion was primarily a deep dive into Arrow Lake’s new design but from the beginning, it was obvious that many were interested in what happened with the launch of Intel’s newest desktop processors.
It has been noted that reviews differed significantly from Intel’s published documents for the Core Ultra 200S processors and sometimes only aligned in very select testing scenarios. Mr. Hallock shares that Intel is not holding reviewers at fault for performance issues found during their testing as it has identified multiple issues at OS and BIOS levels. As Intel identifies these issues and presumably continues its research into them, it will work with partners to roll out updates.
Transcription from YouTube (via VideoCardz):
“I think what people have been interested to hear is what happened. 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 (through no fault of reviewers) is not what we expected and not what we intended. The launch just didn’t go as planned. That has been a humbling less for all of us, inspiring a fairly large response internally to get to the bottom of what happened and to fix it.”
While Arrow Lake can seem attractive for specific work scenarios, it has been deemed as something to avoid by a number of reviewers when it comes to gaming. This has only been exacerbated by the recent launch of the AMD 9800X3D 8C/16T processor which has managed to best both AMD’s past flagship gaming CPUs but more or less dominate the 24-core 8P+16E Intel Core Ultra 9 Processor 285K, thus leading many to wonder if Intel’s newest offerings have any relevance in the gaming sector.