Reviews for Intel’s newly-launched Core Ultra 200S series is nothing short of scathing – critics pointed out its lack of performance improvements, and in some edge cases, a severe performance regression that rendered it uncompetitive, especially in gaming.
Intel: Fix Coming By Early December
The verdicts from reviewers has likely caught Team Blue off guard, as Robert Hallock (VP & GM of Client AI and Technical Marketing) puts it in his interview with HotHardware: “The launch just didn’t go as planned. That has been a humbling lesson for all of us, inspiring a fairly large response internally to get to the bottom of what happened and to fix it.”
According to him, Intel’s engineers has “identified a series of multifactor issues at the OS level, at the BIOS level” which caused the disparity between internal results and what reviewers at large can produce. One reviewer even encountered significantly higher memory latency (up to 180 nanoseconds), which is more than double the expected number, or 70-80 nanoseconds. (Editor’s note: during our Core Ultra testing process we observed ~92ns with DDR5-6400 modules, which also exceeds expected values).
The good news is, this is a fixable issue. Hallock confirms that fixes are expected to arrive by late November, or early December at the latest. That being said, no specific issue was mentioned as to what caused them. One of the more prominent assumption was the significantly higher memory latency, but he noted that’s not the root cause – and neither is the tile-based design that incurred performance penalties, either.
Overall, it’s not a good luck for Intel right now. With AMD’s highly-successful launch of its new Ryzen 7 9800X3D, the chipmaker needs to pull a miracle to even have the chance to compete, but the more realistic outcome will likely see Arrow Lake be completely dismissed for anyone serious about gaming performance.
Pokdepinion: The damage is likely done at this point, plus the knockout punch AMD is delivering with that monster of a gaming CPU.
