Intel announces Arrow Lake fix coming within a month — Robert Hallock confirms poor gaming performance is due to optimization issues

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A fix is on the way.

Press image of Intel Core Series 200S processor on a dramatic blue and black background
(Image credit: Intel)

Intel's Robert Hallock has confirmed that Intel's Core Ultra 200S series launch did not go as planned. In a live stream with HotHardware on YouTube, Hallock revealed that optimization issues with the Arrow Lake platform were the primary cause of degradation in gaming (versus Intel's previous-gen Raptor Lake chips).

Intel identified a number of issues that caused Arrow Lake to exhibit bizarre performance characteristics in some workloads. Hallock revealed that certain combinations of BIOS and OS-level settings created issues that hampered performance. 

Responding to a question from Tom's Hardware managing editor Paul Alcorn, Hallock said that Intel hopes to have at least a couple of fixes for Arrow Lake by the end of November — or by early December at the latest. 

Intel's Hallock On Arrow Lake Core Ultra 200S Processor Performance Fixes - YouTube Intel's Hallock On Arrow Lake Core Ultra 200S Processor Performance Fixes - YouTube
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In one instance, a reviewer recorded memory latency as high as 180ns — over 2x worse than Arrow Lake's expected memory latency of 70 - 80ns.

Despite this memory latency issue, Hallock confirmed to HotHardware that Arrow Lake's gaming performance regression compared to Raptor Lake was not related to memory latency, nor was it caused by Intel's decision to swap to a tile-based architecture. Instead, Arrow Lake's underwhelming gaming performance was caused by tuning and optimization issues. 

According to Hallock, Arrow Lake's performance from third-party reviewers did not align with what Intel saw in its internal testing. Hallock noted a massive disconnect between third-party review performance and Intel's internal testing. 

Intel is purportedly working on a large internal response to fix these issues. Hallock did not describe in detail the exact issues that are plaguing Arrow Lake's performance scores, but he did say that Intel will undergo a full audit that explains exactly what went wrong with the launch of Arrow Lake and an outline of what the company is going to do to fix it. 

That Intel recognizes Arrow Lake's poor launch and massive optimization issues is... encouraging. The Core Ultra 200S series was arguably one of Intel's worst launches in recent memory, with gaming performance coming in as the chip's Achilles' heel. 

In our Core Ultra 9 285K review, the flagship Arrow Lake chip performed worse than the Core i9-14900K in our 14-game 1080p Geomean — even when using super-fast 8200 MHz DDR5 CUDIMMs. Arrow Lake's debut was even more embarrassing compared to the launch of AMD's Ryzen 7 9800X3D, which performed up to 60% faster than the Core Ultra 9 285K in games.

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Aaron Klotz
Aaron Klotz
Contributing Writer

Aaron Klotz is a contributing writer for Tom’s Hardware, covering news related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.

35 Comments Comment from the forums
  • why_wolf
    So either he is lying or their internal QA is completely incompetent.
    Reply
  • flowingbass
    Intel can wince, cry, beg. All i see are excuses.

    It's good to see their past dirty, evil, manipulative business tactics come back and bite them in their complacent balls.

    Desperately clinging onto their withering and rotting laurels, counting very heavily on "too big to fail" mantra.

    Their contempt for the entire world with quad cores but with hyperthreading! Got em! was like the dark ages.
    Just because the competition was stuck in contract with lackluster semiconductor manufacturing process.

    Karma finally put its foot down on intel.
    Reply
  • blargh4
    So after the last couple generations self-destructed, they're still unable to properly qualify and test a chip before shoving it on the market? Very encouraging.
    Reply
  • bluvg
    Zen 5 launch, mixed bag of results: "stick with Zen 4 for now, but it'll get better"
    Intel ARL launch, mixed bag of results: "ARL is a disaster, Intel must die"

    It may be fashionable (and warranted in some cases) to pig-pile on Intel right now, but maybe cut them the same slack as others for a product fresh out of the oven? A strong Intel is good for the industry.
    Reply
  • diminishedfifth
    If all these "third party reviewers" are coming to the same conclusion, which does not align with Intel's conclusion.
    Maybe it's an Intel issue with how they test their products, cause we all know third party reviewers. All have the exact same setups and do everything in coordination with each other to coordinate their attacks against Intel 😭
    Reply
  • bit_user
    Wow, why can no one seem to pull off a decent launch, these days?

    I guess AMD redeemed itself with the 9800X3D, at least.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    bluvg said:
    Zen 5 launch, mixed bag of results: "stick with Zen 4 for now, but it'll get better"
    Intel ARL launch, mixed bag of results: "ARL is a disaster, Intel must die"
    That's a false equivalence. Zen 5 was faster than Zen 4 in nearly every game. Arrow Lake was slower than Raptor Lake in nearly every game.

    bluvg said:
    It may be fashionable (and warranted in some cases) to pig-pile on Intel right now,
    You're just trying to dismiss legitimate concerns as bias. You're not fooling anyone who actually followed these launches. Maybe you didn't?

    bluvg said:
    A strong Intel is good for the industry.
    There are plenty of other competitors, coming up now. If Intel leaves the scene (and I'm not saying they will), AMD won't have a chance to get lazy.
    Reply
  • hotaru251
    Honestly ignoring the performance of their new cpu's the Intel "quality" they have earned over 20+ yrs is basically dead at this point.

    With a company the size of Intel (and its massive compared to amd) you shouldnt be launching cpu's with these issues as should been caught when testing them.

    bluvg said:
    A strong Intel is good for the industry.
    yes, but that doesn't get them free ride.
    They have made blunder after blunder and thats a them issue. Nobody should be putting em on a pedestal for that. Its real life not a children's game where everyone gets a trophy win or lose.
    People WANT Intel to be like they were in the past (as again competition keeps prices low & progress moving).

    They have to earn it though not have it handed to em freely.
    Reply
  • endocine
    Rob Hallock went from bashing intel, to working there, and now apologizing for them. Very trustworthy individual, and should believe every word when he says its an optimization issue and will get fixed.
    Reply
  • thestryker
    It was very obvious from some of the reviews that there were some outliers in gaming performance. I highly doubt any of these updates/fixes will fundamentally change anything overall conclusion wise, but I'd expect results like when all 3 ARL CPUs are slower than Zen 3 (non-X3D) to go away.

    When Steve from HUB did their testing on the 245K he found even more dramatic outliers where just that SKU was slower than the rest by a fair margin. I think it was Jay (JayzTwoCents) who saw some random gaming performance upticks from E-core overclocking which really shouldn't happen unless it's a super core heavy title.

    Pretty sure Intel knew about the performance issues since Steve said as much in a recent HUB podcast where he talked about the communication difference between Intel and AMD and how Intel told him his results weren't notably different from theirs so I'm not sure what Hallock is referring to (though I haven't watched the video so I do not know exactly what was said and am basing on what this article indicates).

    Edit:
    I watched the interview and he says it was when they were getting reports from reviewers and verifying is when they found the issues. So it wasn't as simple as just Intel seeing one thing and reviewers another like the article here says.

    If I had to guess Intel probably does like AMD and uses canned benchmarks so things can be automated more easily. This is something several reviewers have gotten away from for a lot of CPU testing as many canned benchmarks are very GPU heavy even with games that are CPU heavy. CP2077 would potentially be an example in that Intel's results showed 21% behind 7950X3D while TPU and TechSpot/HUB show 33-40% difference. I'm assuming these circumstances would be the only ones where Intel's data didn't match reviewer.

    We'll see if what he says comes to pass with regards to changing processes and speaking publicly about the specific performance issues. I'll believe it when I see it.
    /Edit.

    I'm tired of the bog standard deflect which is why I liked Tom Peterson talking about Arc and just being honest about it needing to take time to fix what could be. Still no excuse for a messy launch, but at this point a company being honest about what's going on is an anomaly.
    Reply