Intel’s new Arrow Lake CPUs came out in October promising high performance at lower power levels, but reviews, including ours, noted surprisingly lackluster gaming performance. Tom Warren said of the Core Ultra 9 285K, “...in many titles, it provides worse performance than the 14th Gen chips it was designed to replace.”

Intel Arrow Lake desktop CPU performance issues explained by new company blog post outlining fixes which will take through January 2025 at least to roll out.

Intel rounds off its blog by saying that it has identified further BIOS improvements that it's currently in the process of validating and is targeting a firmware release, with all these updates and microcode 0x114, sometime in late January. It plans on presenting all of these findings in detail at CES 2025.

As if Intel didn't have enough problems this year, it's recent "Arrow Lake" processors arrived with performance issues, especially in gaming.

In light of such performance numbers, Intel's Vice President and General Manager, Robert Hallock, announced last month that an investigation was underway. The company hopes to restore gaming performance to its original targets and share details this month.

The Core Ultra 200S had four problems at launch, which have now been resolved. A further BIOS update for more performance will follow.

Historically speaking, even when it wasn't the absolute fastest option, Intel has always been 'competitive' with longtime rival AMD in terms of CPU gaming performance. That is actually still the case for the company's 14th-generation Core processors,