Intel fine wine?
There’s perception that AMD releases CPU rather early and tweaks the platform (firmware, drivers and other things) after the release. Performance improves as time goes on, but on the other hand, it’s not at 100% at the beginning. Ryzen 9000 really put this on display, but it looks like Intel may be the same story this year. Core Ultra 200S CPUs have allegedly not shown their real power and will get faster. Will that turn the tide?
This sounds like a carbon copy of the situation with Ryzen 9000. Especially the gaming performance of the new generation LGA 1851 platform desktop processors, Intel Core 200S (codenamed Arrow Lake) turned out to be a bit disappointing in the reviews. In many games, the new CPU is significantly behind not only the competition, but also Intel’s previous generation, 7nm Raptor Lake processors (Core 13th and 14th generation). It must be said that Ryzen 9000 has not actually regressed like this, so the degree of “disappointment” is probably objectively greater with Intel’s launch.
Arrow Lake „fine wine“
As with Zen 5, however, the picture may yet improve, as Intel is preparing patches or improvements that should supposedly improve gaming performance. This was said by Robert Hallock of Intel’s technical marketing (you may remember him from the same role at AMD, Intel managed to bring him over from the competitor last summer) in an interview with HotHardware covering the Arrow Lake release.
According to Hallock’s admission, the release did not go as planned, and Intel is not satisfied with the results. According to Hallock, the performance deficits are mainly due to the newness of the platform, and Intel definitely wants to work on these shortcomings. Because of this, current performance is not fully up to Intel’s expectations – or, at least in some situations. Similar to AMD with Ryzen 9000, Intel has done some testing and performance projections of their own, and the company says that in a number of reviews, the reality turned out worse than it should have based on the internal data. And it’s at these deficits where performance could improve. These cases are supposed to be mostly about gaming performance, probably not so much application performance.
Hallock did not disclose the exact causes, but there are several and not just one. Intel is still analyzing some of the issues, for example, some negative effects a are caused by certain settings in the BIOS or operating system. So this is probably not down to a single isolated problem that would perhaps be similar to the issue of Windows lacking branch prediction optimizations for AMD processors, recently.
One of the problems is memory latency, which according to Hallock should usually be somewhere around 75–85 ns, but in some extreme cases the system can show numbers up to around 180 ns, which is supposed to be a bug. Such unexpectedly bad latency should be one of the things that will be fixed and improve game performance (but if your system was already showing the correct latency of around 80 ns, the fix won’t make a difference, obviously). Memory latency is not the only factor though, according to Hallock there can be many, and the biggest performance issues with Arrow Lake are probably often a result of a combination of multiple such causes that add up.
Arrow Lake will get fixes to improve performance, expect them at the end of the month
The important information is that it’s not just that Arrow Lake and the LGA 1851 platform have various issues leading to worse-than-expected performance, but at least some of these issues have yet to be fixed or addressed in a way, so there will be an improvement in processor performance as a result. According to Hallock, some such fixes or optimizations should be out by the end of this month (November) or early next month (December). So Intel fans have reasons to be optimistic, Arrow Lake processors should at least improve a bit in the performance charts in the tests.
It is not clear yet how much performance improvement can be expected from this platform “maturing”. Robert Hallock has given no indication of what the differences might be in a typical case. If somebody was hit by those extreme cases that led to 180ns memory latency,they should see big improvements in games. But at the same time, such huge issues likely occurred relatively uncommonly.
With Ryzen 9000, the various post-release fixes or optimizations were quite a pleasant surprise in the end, so we’ll see if the situation with Arrow Lake processors and the LGA 1851 platform improves significantly as well. That the platform was released in a relatively immature state (more precisely: less mature than what was usual for Intel before) is something that appears to be true. There were even instability issues (BSODs, system corruption related to iGPU driver installation conflicts for example) mentioned by reviewers. Such initial flaws shouldn’t be a problem in the long run, and thus buyers don’t have to worry about them too much, as they should be fixed eventually (this is something that applies to such issues both in Intel and in AMD camp).
- Read more: Optimization in Windows 11 will speed up AMD CPUs – Zen 3, 4 and 5
- Read more: 105W TDP for Ryzen 9600X and 9700X is not OC, is covered by warranty
- Read more: Better Zen 5 performance with AGESA 1.2.0.2? AMD fixes latency between CCX
Sources: HotHardware, VideoCardz
English translation and edit by Jozef Dudáš
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