Intel admits defeat on Arrow Lake — but it’s not down for the count

1 week ago 1

Intel’s Arrow Lake CPUs aren’t off to a great start. As you can read in our Core Ultra 9 285K review and Core Ultra 5 245K review, Intel’s latest CPUs miss the mark across productivity and gaming apps, and they’re miles away from some of the best processors you can buy right now. According to Intel, there are several issues with the new platform that it plans to address within a matter of weeks.

In an interview with HotHardware, Intel’s Robert Hallock was blunt about the release of Arrow Lake CPUs: “The launch didn’t go as planned … we have a number of things we got to go fix.” Hallock, formerly of AMD, is near the top of Intel’s technical marketing division. Although he didn’t address exactly what’s wrong with Arrow Lake, Hallock promised that Intel is working on updates that could significantly improve performance, and that they’ll arrive in a matter of weeks.

“There are BIOS, firmware, OS-level issues that we need to solve,” Hallock said. “We’re going to come back with a full audit, an itemized list, of what went wrong.”

Intel's Hallock On Arrow Lake Core Ultra 200S Processor Performance Fixes

It’s not exactly surprising that there’s something wrong with Arrow Lake. As we saw in our reviews of the processors, Intel pulled off some incredible feats with the new CPUs. For instance, the Core Ultra 9 285K, despite only having 24 threads, cleanly beats the 32-thread Ryzen 9 9950X in rendering applications like Cinebench. However, the new CPU takes a beating in games, especially compared to the new Ryzen 7 9800X3D.

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The performance is disjointed. Intel makes big strides in some applications, while it’s woefully slow in others. Hallock admits that these issues aren’t the fault of users or reviews; he describes the issues with Arrow Lake as “self-inflicted.” Although Hallock didn’t provide a firm timeline for when we’ll see performance updates, they should arrive before the end of the year.

Hopefully, they’ll deliver the missing performance so many reviewers — including Digital Trends — spotted during the launch window. Intel has been falling on hard times as of late, with some reports indicating that a potential AMD buyout is on the table. Arrow Lake, with its radically new architecture, looked like a turning point for the company. Up to this point, however, it’s fallen significantly behind the competition from AMD, and even Intel’s own last-gen options. Hopefully, the promised updates will deliver good news.

Jacob Roach

Jacob Roach is the lead reporter for PC hardware at Digital Trends. In addition to covering the latest PC components, from…

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Fingers holding an Intel 285K.

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Not this again: Intel Arrow Lake may have instability issues

A render for an Intel Arrow Lake CPU.

Intel's Arrow Lake is just a couple of days from hitting the market, and we've been inundated with various reports and leaked benchmarks. Today's news doesn't sound good, though. YouTuber Moore's Law Is Dead reports that Arrow Lake, also referred to as Core Ultra 200-S, may have some instability issues -- much like what we've seen Intel battle for months on end with Raptor Lake.

Before we dive in, keep in mind that all of this is yet to be confirmed, and we're mere days away from finding out whether it's true or not. However, it could give some buyers a reason to hold off and read the reviews before preordering the CPUs. Moore's Law Is Dead talked about various reviewers and tech YouTubers who had something bad to say about Arrow Lake's stability. The issues are twofold: A wild discrepancy between benchmarks, and running into crashes.

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Intel Core Ultra Series 2 Lunar Lake chipset.

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