Intel’s Arrow Lake fix doesn’t seem to be working

When Intel’s Arrow Lake chips were released, the technology industry expected the company to release a generation of processors that solved the previous two problems. So far, that’s true enough, and Arrow Lake doesn’t seem to have the same overvoltage issues that caused the early degradation of Raptor Lake and its refreshes.

But that was the only good news in this release, as the Intel Core Ultra 2 announcement came with a huge list of issues of its own. Performance varied across the board, and different reviewers often had very different benchmark results from the same settings. RAM compatibility seems to be another big issue, with some kits refusing to boot with XMP settings and others refusing to boot at all.

After investigating since launch, Intel found some things that didn’t match up with internal testing, promised updates to fix performance issues, and motherboard manufacturers rushed out Windows and new BIOS versions. Both quickly released a series of updates. . However, performance doesn’t seem to have improved, and I noticed a decrease in RAM compatibility with the kit I used for one of my Arrow Lake reviews.

Inconsistent benchmarks and Windows weirdness all over the place

Arrow Lake’s launch did not go smoothly. Even after trying all the troubleshooting steps I’ve learned over years of testing, the performance issue still persists. Some of these issues were clearly BIOS bugs due to settings not being changed properly, such as the voltage of the DDR5 RAM when XMP is enabled. There were other Windows issues where changing the power plan helped, even if it didn’t fix them all.

To Intel’s credit, they immediately took responsibility for the problem, saying it was caused by an optimization issue and promising some fixes by the end of the year. The company also said that it did not notice any of these issues in its internal testing and was somewhat confused as to why a review indicated otherwise. No matter what happened, the message was, “We hear you. We’re looking into it. We’re working to resolve it.”

Intel promised to resolve the issue.

Pre-launch internal testing did not match review benchmarks

In mid-December, Intel announced the progress of its Arrow Lake fixes. The company had discovered five performance impediments, at least three of which were already out there.

Performance and Power Management (PPM) package is missing. Failed to enable Intel Application Performance Optimizer (APO). A BSOD occurs when you try to launch a game title using the Easy Anti-Cheat service. Select a performance setting that the reviewer misconfigured or enable the BIOS early. New BIOS performance optimizations.

Two of the fixes were related to missing Windows updates required for Arrow Lake to run at peak performance. These were already included in Windows Update before they were announced, and many people (including myself) were using them without knowing it. One is the Easy Anti-Cheat fix, which fixes an issue that causes Arrow Lake computers to get kicked out of multiplayer games.

The last two are BIOS updates, one currently available from the Z890 motherboard manufacturer and the other expected in January 2025. I enabled the relevant settings and updated to the latest BIOS version, but I can’t say it made any difference. my results. According to Intel, this particular BIOS can potentially restore performance by 2-14% depending on the task, but 2% is within the margin of error in many tests, so the tests that yielded significant improvements It’s possible that I’m not getting it right.

That being said, the test programs we use here at XDA have been chosen to demonstrate the tasks that most users will use these CPUs for. A 2% increase is not a big deal at all, and I was disappointed that Intel said it was higher in internal testing. Also, the RAM configuration that worked during my review of the Core Ultra 9 285K no longer works, so it’s now stuck at 5,600MT/s or 6,400MT/s.

We’ll check back once the final promised BIOS update is available for testing, but the outlook looks bleak at the moment.

The fixes so far are not definitive

RAM compatibility seems to be hit or miss, and most of it is a hit or miss.

None of the fixes Intel has identified, mentioned, or promised have anything to do with the biggest issue I currently have with Arrow Lake. It’s RAM compatibility and it’s terrible. It feels like AMD Ryzen Zen 1 was launched at a time when most of the DDR4 kits available didn’t boot at the speeds they were sold for, or refused to boot at all. At the time, RAM kits using Samsung’s B-Die quickly emerged as saviors for the platform, but we have yet to find a similar kit this time around.

Over the years, I have accumulated numerous DDR5 kits of varying latencies and capacities, from 5,600MT/s to 8,800MT/s. I tried all of these on my Core Ultra 9 285K with varying degrees of success. I wouldn’t call it a success, but after days of trying different combinations of settings on different kits, being able to boot Windows on a few kits felt like a victory.

It’s unlikely that my motherboard configuration is the culprit, but since I’m not the only one having issues with RAM compatibility, I suspect it’s a platform issue. This could potentially be solved by Intel, but the fact that they haven’t mentioned anything yet suggests that this problem doesn’t have an easy or quick solution.

The jury is out, but there’s hope.

So far, since reviewing the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K, the updates Intel has rolled out to Arrow Lake for Windows 11 and the motherboard BIOS have not affected my experience. Performance is still lower than expected, with 12th generation Intel chips showing better numbers. Things might change with a different LGA1851 motherboard, but based on TechPowerUp’s detailed testing, I’m not holding my breath.

Their tests also included the 0x114 microcode, the last part of Intel’s promised fix. Although we made some gains, we did not improve our overall ranking against AMD Ryzen or Intel Raptor Lake. This microcode is an improvement for Windows 11 24H2 users, but doesn’t change much for 23H2 users. This is interesting, to say the least.

Will Intel be able to identify further fixes for future microcode updates, or was the late switch to the TSMC process and 18A internal struggles too much for Arrow Lake? Only time will tell But at this point I’m leaning towards the latter option. Intel needs to hit the 20A fence and hope its next desktop release is a hit, but if it doesn’t, it will end up stuck in a rut for years, just like AMD was in the bulldozer days. It will be.