Intel admits that the Arrow Lake launch was a failure and promises performance improvements by December. But my testing suggests that you shouldn't be too hopeful.

Intel acknowledged in an interview that its launch of the Arrow Lake processor didn't go according to plan, citing a discrepancy between its own results, and those of reviewers. Intel also announced that it would be releasing some performance fixes soon to address these differences. My own meeting with Intel and the additional tests I have carried out since suggest that you shouldn't be expecting any big gains.

Robert Hallock, Intel Vice President and General Manager of Client AI and Tech Marketing, made the promise to HotHardware during a chat. He began by pointing to the areas where Intel has found problems. "I cannot go into the details just yet, but we identified [multifactor] issues." They're on the OS level and they're on the BIOS level."

Hallock commented on the test results of Arrow Lake, saying "the performance that we saw in review - and to be clear, it was not due to the reviewers' fault - was not what we anticipated or what we intended. The launch didn't go according to plan.

The phrase "not as we expected" is especially interesting, because when I met with Intel to discuss my results and benchmarking techniques prior to the release of the review, they said that these figures were in line, although a bit behind, with their internal testing.

Even so, I am not convinced that Arrow Lake can be fixed so easily, at least for gaming. I've been testing different RAM speeds and changing the clocks on Core Ultra 200S processors. I found that the most stable overclocked configuration, using super-fast RAM, involved an 11% increase in cache ring clock of the compute tile, a 15% boost in uncore clock (NGU), as well as a 19% boost in die-to-die clock.

When paired with a 48GB kit of DDR5-8000 memory, running in Gear 2 Mode, the average performance increase was only 2%. The decrease in the low figures of 1% was 7%. Total War: Warhammer 3 was the culprit in the case of the latter. Cyberpunk 2077, Baldur's Gate 3 and other games improved by 5%.

Those gains came with a power increase of 15% on average in gaming (26.6% in the case Baldur's Gate 3). Arrow Lake's power increase is acceptable, as it is not as power-hungry in gaming as Raptor Lake.

I've also experimented with Intel's Application Optimizer (APO), a tool that manages the threads created by certain games so they work better on Intel's hybrid architecture. All of Intel's performance data in the Core Ultra 200S marketing slides was taken with APO enabled.

APO has no effect on Cyberpunk 2077, when I use an MSI MAG Z890 ACE and DDR5-6500 CL30 in my Arrow Lake test rig. Metro Exodus, Total War: Warhammer 3 and Metro Exodus run better with APO. However, the improvement is not huge.

If overclocking, high speed RAM, and APO aren't enough to bring Arrow Lake's performance up to the level of Raptor Lake or AMD's Zen 5's, will Intel's Windows and BIOS updates make a big difference?

It's possible, especially with regard to the firmware on motherboards. The Asus board that I used for testing the Ultra 9 285K & Ultra 5 245K performed much better in our Factorio tests than either of the MSI Z890 Boards I have.

Arrow Lake is a great processor, with its reduced power consumption and content creation performance. However, I don't think it is ideal for gaming. Intel's new design is similar in many ways to AMD's Ryzen 3000-series desktop CPUs, AMD's very first processors to use the chiplet design.

Zen 2 and Arrow Lake have their memory controllers on separate dies from the CPU cores. This isn't ideal for latency. However, AMD has now improved clock speeds and timings to minimise latency. The 3D V-Cache chip's massive L3 cache is even more helpful.

I hope that Intel can bring Arrow Lake to a point where it is a decent enough game CPU, even if just because most prebuilt Intel gaming computers will be sporting a Core Ultra 200S processor. The Ryzen 7 9800X3D is exceeding expectations and selling like hotcakes, but they will never be the best gaming processors money can purchase.