It’s no lie to say that Intel’s Core Ultra 200 desktop processors were a disappointment, with gremlins at launch and poor performance pretty much across the board, especially in games. Thankfully, there might be hope for them yet as two sources point at some significant changes coming by way of free updates directly from Intel to hopefully fix areas where they lagged behind more than they should (Cyberpunk 2077 gaming performance was definitely one area), but also to boost overall performance.
I had hoped to report on the update itself, but seeing as it’s not yet appeared and with no further announcements, we’re covering the issues and what the potential fixes will look like today. The first glimmer of hope for anyone that owns or is considering owning Intel’s latest Arrow Lake Core Ultra 200 processors, is direct from Intel’s Robert Hallock, who in an interview with tech channel HotHardware recently, said Intel had identified a series of multifactor issues at the OS level and at the BIOS level that contributed to the poor performance.
This is a fairly significant admission and for a few reasons. Firstly, it does feel like there was a lack of optimization, perhaps with Windows and other software and the variation here between reviewers systems was enough to see some results much worse than others, although generally performance was still much lower than expected. While Robert’s explanation when quizzed about a rushed launch, was that there were no external factors such as AMD’s impending 3D V-Cache processors, there may have been pressure in terms of sales to launch within that quarter.
Whether this was the reason for the issues we encountered with the Core Ultra 200 series will probably never be known, but combined with potential issues on the BIOS level means that potential fixes count result in significant performance improvements seeing as these CPUs and the way they talk to the rest of the system seems to be very broken currently.
This is exactly what Intel didn’t want with a major launch of a new CPU socket that requires a huge investment from would-be upgraders, especially of they were using older DDR4 memory in their current PCs (the Core Ultra 200-series requires DDR5 memory). We’re still waiting on any kind of update from Intel, but X (formerly Twitter) user and overclocker SkatterBencher has seemingly got inside information regarding a microcode fix (via WCCFtech).
The VF or voltage frequency behaviour seems to be a target for major changes, although it’s unclear if this is the only improvement we’ll see when Intel finally releases the update. Motherboard manufacturer ASRock has also chipped in and specifically mentioned the Platform Power Management driver (which is also linked to processor frequency and voltage) and a new driver that can be downloaded and installed for Core Ultra 200 systems, claiming up to 13% more performance.
Thankfully, it does seem that Intel could still significantly improve the performance of its Arrow Lake processors to offer more competition. AMD’s 3D V-Cache processors are likely to demand high prices and with the standard Ryzen 9000 models also suffering from a limp launch, it wouldn’t be impossible for Intel to turn the tide here.
I’ll be covering the Intel update when it’s announced so follow me here on Forbes using the blue button below, Facebook or YouTube to get the latest news and reviews.
