Intel has released a statement following the company’s rocky Arrow Lake launch last month. Reviews of the new Intel Core Ultra 200 Series CPUs went live in October and tests showed lacklustre performance, high energy use and intense thermals. However, the company now says that these new chips should actually be performing better. To show the world just how much better they should be, Intel plans to release an update to enhance them soon.
According to Intel, these new Core Ultra 200 Series CPUs were always designed to perform under AMD’s chips when it came to gaming. Reviews showed that the new chips didn’t match the previous Intel Raptor Lake benchmarks. So already, users are questioning the extent of Intel’s upgrade approach for the new range.
According to Robert Hallock, Intel’s VP and GM of client AI and technical marketing, Arrow Lake is experiencing some “pretty wild unintended effects” which is resulting in these low-performance issues. Intel claims that the issues are strictly down to the chips themselves and not Windows.
The company claims to be identifying the problems and working on fixes. But is it too late? Intel has not provided an ETA on the fixes. We also don’t know under what conditions these chips are suffering from performance bugs. Hallock says the fix will come with a “flash the BIOS and update Windows kinda situation”.
This marks the second major tech failure from Intel two years in a row. Last year, Intel struggled with the Raptor Lake chips which were causing hardware failures and crashing under certain scenarios. Users reported having damaged chips as a result of the bug.
Keep in mind that while Intel suffers major earning losses from these failed launches, brands also struggle too. Various hardware makers can’t move stock as a result of these rocky launches. This results in motherboard sales dipping due to the poor adoption rate. Intel is forcing users to purchase a new LGA socket board to support these underperforming Arrow Lake chips. So users simply won’t buy the chip and the board now.
I reviewed two boards during the launch campaign for the new Intel Core Ultra 200S. The ASUS ROG Maximus Z890 HERO and the Gigabyte Z890 Aorus Master. The boards are excellent. The Intel chips, however, aren’t so great.
